How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

The Southern cause was effectively lost after Major General Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg, splitting the Confederacy in two down the Mississippi River axis, and General George G. Meade repelled General Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg in July 1863 in the two decisive battles of the war, fought within the same week. The Confederacy faced inevitable strangulation by the vastly superior forces of the North. Nonetheless, the South fought on for another eighteen months. Between Gettysburg and Vicksburg, one hundred thousand men had died, bringing the total number of deaths in major battles to more than a quarter of a million. But another two hundred thousand soldiers would die before Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in April 1865.