LAD #4: Revolution Article

1. The Civil War is considered more horrific than the War of Independence for various reasons that are common misconceptions about the War. These misconceptions revolved around the fact that the War of Independence was overshadowed by the larger number of causalities in the Civil War and the politics behind the American Revolution and the founding of the United States.

2. Civilians were actually more effected by the war than most people think. .5% of the civilian population was killed during the Revolutionary War and Loyalists were highly persecuted. Loyalists lost almost all their land to confiscation and upwards of 100,000 Loyalists went into exile following the war.

3. The South played a much larger role in the Revolutionary War and was the sight of more bloodshed than most believe to have occurred there. The British Colonel Tarleton massacred 75 percent of a surrendered American legion in Virginia in what is known as the Waxhaws Massacre. Even more blatant killing took place in the South following the rebel victory at King's Mountain and Colonel Henry Lees assault on Loyalist Cavalry in Hillsborough N.C.

4. Revolutionary War battlefields were just as bloody and littered with corpses as the Civil War although not perceived that way. Countless accounts of the War of Independence describe how severe the devastation was on the battlefields and just how many causalities lie dead or dying on the battlefield. Some accounts described the crushing of corpses beneath retreating wagons of the revolutionaries and others say the bodies "lay as thick as the stones on a stony plowfield".

5. The immortal figures of George Washington, Ben Franklin, and others were substantially aided by biographies and history's interpretation of the Revolutionary War. The people history remembers from the Revolution are political figures like John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, as opposed to war figures that are honored by the Civil War. Washington, shortly after his death, had his famous biography published by Parson Weems that made his persona seem to be the epitome of honor and valor, making him seem all the more great than he actually was.

This represents how Washington is immortalized as a figure more than the actual battles of the Revolutionary War. This makes the War of Independence seem less deadly than the Civil War as it is conceived as more of a struggle of honor and famous figures, than bloody battles that left countless dead.