Name: Appomattox Court House and Lincoln's Assassination
Uploaded: 2014-05-10T07:09:57.000Z
Duration: 6 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In the video where I give an overview of American history

through the Civil War, I commented that it's unfortunate

Basic passive voice

that Abraham Lincoln is assassinated shortly

And although that is technically correct, what I want to do

is clarify that comment a little bit in this video.

Because in actuality by the time he was assassinated,

Lincoln knew that the Union was very, very, very likely

to win the war, that the major Confederate armies had already

you have the battle at Appomattox Courthouse,

and after that battle the Confederate army

And one point of confusion some people often have, and I

is that Appomattox Courthouse is the name of the city,

that the surrender actually did not take place

And I actually shouldn't even call it a city.

It's like a little town with a handful of buildings.

his set of circumstances or how he is tied to the Civil War,

Because in 1861 the first battle of the Civil War

occurred on his property in Manassas, Virginia.

He was sympathetic with the Confederate army.

He did not like that northern Virginia was

of Appomattox Courthouse, which is in central Virginia.

So the very first major land battle of the Civil War

And the last major or really the major surrender

of the Civil War occurs inside this guy's house

felt that it was appropriate to have this kind of major end

But regardless, that happens on April 9, 1865.

The major Confederate army surrenders to the Union army.

The reason why this is not the formal end of the Civil War

is that you still had 175,000 Confederate troops other places

So these people who were fighting, many of them

did not even know that the Confederate army had already

is what leads to Lincoln's assassination.

hey, there's a 99.9% chance that the Union has won.

need to find out that their major army has surrendered,

or the Union has to go and essentially force

all of the rest of the armies to surrender.

Lincoln already knows that Robert E. Lee's army

But you have this gentleman right over here, John Wilkes

Booth, who is sympathetic to the Confederate cause.

He does see this as a major blow to the Confederate cause,

and he thinks that they need to do something desperate

if they want to have any chance of being able to come back,

being able to maintain their independence from the Union.

So he coordinates with a couple of his buddies.

if we assassinate not only Abraham Lincoln, but also

Andrew Johnson who's the vice president, and Ulysses S Grant,

and we assassinate Seward, who was the Secretary of State.

And the idea there is if you assassinate everyone

then it would just throw the entire Union leadership

in disarray, and maybe it would give these characters over here

a fighting chance to maintain their independence

or maybe come back against the Union Army.

or I guess well you could take it either way,

the other three people were not able to fully execute

He actually did get stabbed in the face and all that,

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Appomattox Court House and Lincoln's Assassination

chance

major

civil

battle