The American Civil War - OverSimplified (Part 1) (Royal Marine Reacts) 

He was the William Howe of the Civil War: good general, but way to skittish about pursuit.

Also when people called us grant a butcher Lincoln did ask what did he drink. And then said give him more whiskey.

@@snakyYT Paraphrasing: "If it would make them fight like Grant, I would send all of my generals a barrel."

@@snakyYTexcept Grant was the furthest thing from a “butcher” that war had. He gets called that and yet had some of the lowest casualty rates whereas Lee (who’s treated like a god) had the highest. Also, all those who died so McClellan could get nowhere? It’s self defeating. Sure Grant may have lost more in a battle but difference being, *he advanced* so it wasn’t for nothing.

@marquisdelafayette1929 it makes sense Lee had the most casualties though. The north switched their generals so many times. Lee replaced a southern genral early in the war.

I enjoyed it too much haha

@@OriginalHuman it's okay my guy. I've never met anyone who didn't like longer videos, we love them

@@OriginalHuman you should react to the Napoleon Wars from Oversimplified or Prohibition. when you have the time i know you have a bus to work on lmao

@@OriginalHuman we did too! Keep up the good content!

@@OriginalHuman We all glad you did. Great video

The word "Zeal" exemplifies it. To find something so axiomatically abhorrent that it drives you to frothing rage... Douglass was a smart man doing a life's work. Brown was a maniac following his heart.

you're also forgetting that just about all Americans were Racists at the time.

@@Genesis50000 Not just Americans, racism was/is a global thing regardless of the status of freed men vs slaves during that era. Still to this day though it is steadily dying out.

Including General Sherman. He became a big advocate of voting rights for African Americans after the war.

They also saw the huge loss if the South actually left/succeeded . It evolved to become about more than just secession but at the start of the war it was more about keeping the country together/protecting profits(sounds bad but its part of the governments job to keep the country strong/getting as much taxes).

@@captaindestruction9332 I mean, what sounds better and "more" morally upright. Fighting over slavery or over economics.

That's not entirely correct. There was a small standing US Army (USA), often referred to as the "Regular Army". (Who do you think was manning Ft Sumpter and running West Point?) There were 16,400 members of the USA at the start of the Civil War. States did, however, contribute the numbered militia units you mentioned, which were known as United States Volunteers (USV). Officers leading these units were referred to by their rank, followed by the title "of Volunteers." (For instance, "Captain of Volunteers." ) Also regular army officers often had 2 ranks, their regular/ actual rank and their rank in the volunteer army. (George Armstrong Custer was a Lt. Col in the regular army/ USA and a Major General in the USV during the Civil War.)

@@helifanodobezanozi7689 thank you for the clarification!

To add another angle to this, the US, despite even recent shifts in priorities at the federal level, has long had a cultural identity revolving around the notion of "you fight for your own place in the world" which makes it so that finding people motivated enough to enlist when our sovereignty is directly threatened very easy and this is also one of the reasons that effectively disarming the entire civilian population of the US is functionally improbable if not impossible

Huh, that's pretty much like the old "tribal" territories for example early medieval scandinavia and east europe (welp... all the non-feudal territories I guess) never knew that, thanks for sharing lad

My 4th great grandfather was in the 49th regiment of Tennessee infantry for example.

I’d like to think that when that happened, one of the captains scrawled out a sign that said “BEER?” and then the two crews just partied together on the river.

It was decided a union victory since the merrimack ran out of coal and retreated first. But realistically yes, a stalemate

Bruh waste of ammo

Additional fun fact: The Monitor's turret malfunctioned not long into the battle and wouldn't stop rotating. So the gunners (who already had just the worst job aboard, being deafened by not only their own guns but the cannonballs hitting the outside of the turret) basically got to sit there and wait for the target to be in front of the gunports and then hurry and fire before they spun past again. Shockingly, taking brand new, advanced, thoroughly untested technology straight into battle is the sort of thing that invites all kinds of unforeseen problems.

That must have been awkward

That's the beauty of being American. It's for everyone lol

@@BenJoverwe’re a nation made of immigrants afterall.

He must be a Republican

that changed once he moved back to England.

@@TripleDinLV no he doesn't. Hés a clown who gets most of his views from his Indian followers.

As a Virginian. I live 15 minutes from at least 3 battle sights.

I live about 30 minutes away from Manassas and have found Civil War bullets in my backyard

Facts. I used to live in VA (NN represent!) and history sites/museums/etc is literally everywhere.

Smack Dab in the heart of VA (between Cville and Richmond.) I wonder why history is my favorite subject. lol

Yea we got cool historical stuff all over the place here. I love VA so much.

And also traveling through time with Bill and Ted.

Then how is it that the British had slave colonies well into 1967?

Of course, while England *officially* ended slavery in their colonies 1833.... (slavery was really gone much sooner in England itself because they had labor surpluses rather than shortages) ...plantation owners in British colonies quickly replaced their slaves with Indentured East Indian labor, who in practice were treated as slaves into the 20th century. Indian indentures really didn't end until WWI and the rise of Indian nationalism,

meh, the other side also quoted the Bible in defense of the practice of slavery.

@@ilikehardplay And because history isn’t complicated enough, the English did more than any other country on the face of the planet Earth to stomp out slavery globally. Even though they definitely DID use questionable labor in parts of the world.

Man i love the Quakers so fucking much dude. One of the most progressive Christian denominations out there

He was very badly injured, too, and ended up with what we would now call PTSD.

Yeah, people need to stop vilifying economics and acknowledge it as a legitimate concern. They are far too quick to dismiss economic concerns these days probably because in many ways we, at least in the US, live in what is probably the closest thing possible to a post-scarcity world and are so far removed from survival that we just don’t realize how much has to be done to not starve especially in a world without safety nets. Which leads to us forgetting that economic interests especially in historical settings are in many cases actually just concerns about being able to acquire/produce things like food. I mean that’s why historically theft was punished so severely because in many cases you were effectively threatening the victim with starvation.

exactly 💯 when I was little kid my favorite place to go in the world was locally up to the Mill Mountain star here where I live in Roanoke Virginia right now before we moved off to Texas and also drive about 4 hours North to Gettysburg. We went every summer in August and we always stopped at the McDonald's in Woodstock Virginia and that was that going up there because I was a big history fanatic starting when I was 8 years old.. people still have old civil War flags and it's really disgusting because people say it's racist but it has nothing to do with that and it's kind of like the old TV show " The dukes of Hazzard". It's a southern thing and just part of the Southern tradition or Southern pride and the more rural or sub rural Life versus Big City New York or La etcetera etcetera but it absolutely has nothing to do with the race or slavery whatsoever but it's just a part of American history. Most of the people here in the South really do like history and unlike a lot of people up north and on the West Coast in the coastal elite up in the Northeast, we love history here and out in the South Midwest etc and even up in the Rockies. Here in the South we definitely do have American flags and some people will have both and it's just part of the US history. I've been to visit some people. Not only do they have everything that they received in service in the military etcetera etcetera but they got American flag and the old Confederate flag. In the 1980s there was a TV show called The dukes of Hazzard county and I think it was placed in North or South Carolina. These two cousins drove a vehicle that was a muscle car like an old Dodge and it was actually painted like a Confederate flag. 😂 It was a really really good show. The civil War was heartbreaking but I didn't blame that on the part of The Americans. Slavery was brought here by the Europeans whether it was Britain France or Spain. When the USA began as a country, some slaveholding founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson and Washington wanted to keep it out of the Constitution and do away with slavery because it was a colonial thing and South Carolina and Georgia refused to ratify the Constitution without slavery.. the reason they did at the time had nothing to do with race but it was because the south in the deep southern area there was not as heavily populated and it still was not anywhere near as populated during the civil War as the North and they needed labor. It's really really sad and to keep our Union together because we were vulnerable new country of course the Jefferson and Washington allowed slavery to stay.. The problem with keeping slavery is that it went from being something the European powers start in here in the Americas but Congress in the USA continued to kick the can down the road just like they do with everything!!!! Look at our budget at 35 trillion and that is Congress kicking the can down the road and they do it with social security and Medicare and everything else.. they are only worried about raising money and getting re-elected and pleasing their donors and when they do work most of them do what their riches donors want them to do. It's really sad because I want a president for everybody regardless of whether we're rich poor or working middle class etc the sad thing is over history and especially since the 1960s people either vote for who they perceive as American royalty like the Kennedys or Obama etcetera or they vote for people who are just politically savvy even if they're jerks... Trump was the first business owner non-politician to get elected and I actually liked that but I hate it and I still do hate the darn nasty talk around it because no Americans should talk so evil about anybody here in the USA.. nobody nobody and we used to be a dysfunctional family being that they could call us names and vice versa but nobody else could😂 it started getting so bad around 2008 and 2012 during the elections that was just so nasty every 4 years and I couldn't stand it... 2016 was a pretty enjoyable election year and after that I dread them. It's ridiculous that it cost so much money to run for political office and I think of all the homeless people that could be fed and our national debt that can be paid you know. .

A late reply but most European countries at the time had standing armies of various sizes alongside a sizeable reserve that could be called up. As wars were less common near the USA they had a smaller standing army, but the national guards of the various states could be called up if needed, a lot of officers who would get to lead armies in the civil war came from the pre-war army and a lot of them knew each other to some degree. Even Lee and Grant had met before the war began, back during the American-Mexican War. This is why Lee was such an effective general, as he not only knew tactics and strategy, but also most of the enemy commanders personally or by reputation, and thus had a good grasp on how they would act.

I second this. It’s one thing to read about the battle, but actually walking the battlefield makes you understand better why certain decisions were made, and why some areas were absolutely critical to turning the tide of battle.

About an hour and a half or so for me, but I've done many school trips, family trips, and Scout trips to Gettysburg. With the Scouts, we camped there and walked a lot of battles, including Picket's Charge which is over a field that seems so much bigger in person than it ever has on a screen.

Well he's already living in Maine as he said. But he should totally check out these historic battle grounds.

Glory is the only civil war movie I watched. I am not a movie guy but holy shit that movie is great.

“Do you know what the southern states were up to before the war?” “Chillin. Yearnin for freedom from yankee tyranny.” “Not exactly.” God I love checkmate Lincolnites.

⁠@@DongusMcBongusidk how they pretend like their VP didn’t straight up give a speech about the “Cornerstone” of their “new great nation is the fundamental truth that African Americans are not equal to whites”.

The first unconditional slavery abolishment was Haiti

One point this video leaves out is that the slave trade - especially the American slave trade - was run by the Dutch. It was the Dutch that would procure slaves from African empires and either ship them over themselves, or then sell them off to others to ship out of Africa.

Paradox games will get da viewssssssssssssssssss XD

@@stratosk2864 I agree

And he should pick up their guns

Britain through several hundred years unleaa im mistaken were one of the few with the ships capable of getting the slaves into the slave trade. The british east india company. They dominated the global trade they traded apices sugar, slaves. They needed the slaves to farm the crop. It was rough. Same thing is happening today apple uses china to put the factory there and china will promise bonuses that dont show up and they get welded in a camp because their covid forced mutation vaccine lab is leaking. Its still happening they just moved rhe slaves to where its harder to free them

Yeah… having grown up in the south we were taught almost none of this in school. Or about the multiple racial massacres in my state, much less the one so many of us realized happened while watching The Watchmen show. Oh and was definitely taught that the civil war was about states rights. Fun stuff, having to pick up all this history slowly as you run across it and realize how horribly uninformed you were.

See I keep hearing and seeing comments like this and I just can’t agree. I personally consider oversimplified fun and well done but very shallow, a very basic summery that can actually be somewhat misleading at times in its simplicity especially with the jokes. There is almost nothing in the American history ones I didn’t already know by high school a lot of it I probably knew coming out of middle school to be honest. I don’t know maybe I just had exceptional exposure as a kid. I suppose I did visit civil war battlefields/forts and see re-enactments as a young kid with my dad and grandfather but it really doesn’t seem like I did anything exceptional I just actually paid attention in class, visited monuments/museums/historic sites occasionally, and read my textbooks alongside a couple other books on the subject.

@@ethansenter5298 I can absolutely believe that, but unfortunately education is wildly inconsistent in the US (not saying anything about comparison to other places, I just have no point of reference there). I was in various versions of honors, and eventually AP courses middle school at more or less mid sized schools in a fairly large city in the south. We barely covered the civil war, or the civil rights movement or anything related and while it’s entirely possible I just don’t remember mention, I’d like to think I would have noticed even then if the multiple entirely race based massacres post civil war were even mentioned. That said, absolutely they are -very- high level/basic overviews. I mean, they wouldn’t be very oversimplified if not. It’s a gateway to realizing there were chunks of history that you didn’t know even existed. For some it might not matter, but I put a lot of value on the approachable summaries as a way to get people interested in knowing more and questioning what they missed. I know most of what these videos bring up, but a disturbing amount of it I only know because I stumbled across something mentioning it and then dug into it myself. And any simplification is going to have some things that can be misleading. I don’t love it, and it’s complicated, but then I’m also from an engineering background where you don’t get anywhere without simplifying at least some things to where they aren’t quite exactly correct but all told get a better end result/understanding than trying to start from the accurate but confusing and counter intuitive exact answer. IE how basic courses generally teach that wings produce lift is.. not actually true.

Actually, I would say most of this was covered by my school. There were even several things covered in school that weren't mentioned in Oversimplified history. The problem is in how the information is presented. Seeing a bunch of names and dates spanning four dense chapters is difficult enough to focus on. But when the textbooks decide to categorize information based on events instead of chronology (under some weird belief that it makes the content more digestible)? That's just makes everything a confusing mess. I'd advise any history teacher to show Oversimplified videos FIRST and then dive into the textbook so students already have some context and know what names and events to pay special attention to...

Not saying he isn't because I don't know, but not everyone named Hanks is necessarily related.

@@7heSlime Fair point, but apparently his genealogy can be traced back to Lincoln's grandparents, making him roughly a third cousin several times removed. He's also a sixth cousin of Mister Rogers. On a different note, Barack Obama is a descendant of Robert E. Lee through his mother.

Epstein

I did a similar project. However the moment he turned traitor he lost all "honorable qualities"

Robert E Lee didn't care about slaves yet owned slaves.

Anyone who takes up arms against his country is a traitor. He's lucky people remember him as fondly as some do.

Oyy mate you can’t being saying that without a license

Hate to break this to you, but according to the 1860 census, slavery was as profitable as it had ever been. Eight of the ten richest states in the nation were located in the South. And the cash value of the slaves in the South was greater that all the land and improvements taken together. The belief that "slavery was in decline" was a product of post-Civil War Southern historians seeking to argue that the war was unnecessary and the fault of abolitionist threats..

@@ilikehardplay Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1794 when slavery was in decline, not 1860. His hope was that it would hasten the fall of slavery, but it instead had the opposite effect, making slavery once again economically viable and causing the massive increase of slavery in the 1800s that led to the Civil War. I've edited the original comment to make this more clear.

Nah it definetly helped kill slavery bro. Suddenly they didnt need a gazillion slavea for that one job they needed 5 slaves to do the same work it meant anyone without the magical machine needed mkre slaves to make the same money they had to feed them they had to buy them now that the machine is out a cotton slave is worth less because a machine just took their job. The cotton gin played a huge role you coukd even say it was one kf the straws the broke its back like how the free states outnumbered the slave states littls by little it all adds up

I appreciate man thank you

Except that "victory" and "defeat" in military terms are referring to whether goals were accomplished, not recourses expent to achieve said goal. That's why the concept of a pyhric victory exists (if your not familiar with the term a pyhric victory is a battle where an army is victorious (IE they achieved their objectives) but at such a high cost that the victory is meaningless (or even detrimental) to the war in the longterm.

No, not neutral. We were a border, along with Missouri and Maryland, because they were slave states but didn't want leave the Union. So Washington allowed them to keep their slaves so as not to make those states mad and succeed as well.

@@jay_g1984 Oh didn’t know that. What I was more saying though is that the border states had high number of supporters for both sides.

@@codygates7418 If you pay attention to the Emancipation Proclamation, it only frees slave in *Confederate* states. It didn't free slaves in slave states that remained in the Union, because Lincoln didn't want to lose the support of those states.

@@Maria_Erias I guess I’m a little bit confused. I know that the Emancipation freed the slaves in Confederate states but, I thought it freed all slaves (North and South)

@@codygates7418 The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in state engaging in active rebellion. If states had decided to leave the confederacy and rejoin the Union before it took effect, they would have been allowed to retain slaves. Really, the only thing the proclamation did was give the Union army legal grounds for liberating slaves.