Introduction - Rough Draft

Introduction – Rough Draft

North Carolina was one of the most important states to the Confederate Army. Had it not been for the state, the Confederate Army would not have been able to last as long as it did. The effects of the Civil War would later come to shape the South and permanently change its culture and identity.

Despite being a greatly looked-over objective of the Union army to historians today, North Carolina provided a last bastion to the Confederacy in the last years of the war. The reason for this dependency on North Carolina is due in part to its ample resources. North Carolina in the 1860’s was a land dominated by pine trees. These pine trees allowed for the production of lumber as well as tar, desperately needed materials for both sides of the war. Its location also managed to maintain the Confederate struggle. Being a central mid-Atlantic state, it was one of the last states to be fully captured by the North, and for this reason major ports along the coast managed to maintain connections to other countries. Possible the most important resource that the state could have provided was the shear number of troops that it contributed to the war effort. Over 130,000 North Carolinians died in the war, despite the lack of battles actually fought in the state. Although historians still seem to overlook the true importance of the state, one of the most influential Union leaders, General William Tecumseh Sherman, personally believed that, to the contrary of what many think, the campaign through the Carolinas was one worth the effort and expenditure of resources more than his famous march through Georgia.