Today, we are pleased to welcome guest authors Drew and Kate Gruber.
“There appears to be a romantic desire urging the South Carolinians to have possession of this work, which was so nobly defended by their ancestors in 1776…” wrote Major Robert Anderson from Fort Moultrie on November 28, 1860, less than five months before the first shots of the American Civil War. Many historians of American history have looked upon the Civil War as a continuation of the American Revolution. Looking back today, the similarities are not hard to see. According to historian Peter S. Carmichael, confederates “proclaimed their nation to be the keeper of America’s revolutionary heritage.”[1] Similarly, James McPherson notes that “Union volunteers invoked the legacy of the Founding Fathers…if disunion destroyed this nation, the generation of 1861 would prove unworthy of the heritage of republican liberty.”[2] This idea was not lost on Civil War soldiers, and their own connection to the ideals of the American Revolution grew even stronger when their marches and battles brought them close to, and even directly on, the landscapes and landmarks sacred to the memory of the American Revolution—soldiers were quick to identify the cause of the Revolution as their own. As soldiers converged on Mount Vernon, Williamsburg, and Yorktown, the connections they made to the revolutionary past of these locations strengthened their own resolve.
Emerging Revolutionary War Era 