DESTINATIONS — THE US
Civil service
The 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War is a sure-fire draw for history lovers, says Joanna Booth
you share a name with turns out to be a blood relative. This isn’t one of those occasions. On the wall of the Ford’s
M
Theatre in Washington DC, there’s an old-fashioned-looking Wanted poster, with a black-and-white photograph. Underneath the picture of the criminal, it simply says ‘Booth’. For it was here that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head, killing America’s most famous president and the man responsible for the abolition of slavery in the US. You can see why I’m hoping
there is no genetic link. Booth assassinated Lincoln on
Good Friday 150 years ago, just before the American Civil War came to an end. This four-year combat, from 1861 to 1865, claimed 600,000 soldiers’ lives, freed the South’s slaves and shaped the America we know today. Civil War battlefields, museums
and related sights are consistently a popular tourist draw, but coverage of the special 150th
ost of the time, you hope that any famous person
anniversary celebrations occurring this and next month to mark the end of the conflict may well inspire clients to book, so now is a good time to make sure you know your Appomattox from your Antietam.
l KEY SIGHTS There are plenty of battlefield sites, all with their own points of interest. Most have a visitors’ centre and interpretative presentations, and clients at all will benefit from guided tours to bring the events that occurred 150 years ago to life. Those on escorted tours will have something pre-organised, but it’s worth looking into whether guides can be booked on the spot for clients on fly-drives. The big daddy of the battlefields is undoubtedly Gettysburg, located in Pennsylvania just north of the Maryland border. The bloodiest of all the Civil War combats, 52,000 soldiers died over three days in summer 1863, and the battle is known as the turning point of the war, after which the South began to lose. Clients can visit significant combat sites, walking the route
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travelweekly.co.uk — 30 April 2015
of Pickett’s Charge, where Confederate forces mounted a desperate assault on Union troops stationed on Cemetery ridge. In Virginia, Manassas was the
site of two Confederate victories in the first two years of the war, and visitors can see a statue of General Jackson, who earned his nickname ‘Stonewall’ here as he rallied his troops to stop the North’s advance. Further north, in Maryland,
Antietam saw 23,000 American lives lost in a one-day battle – a rate of one casualty every two seconds, and four times the number of US troops that died on D-Day. Neither side could really claim a sweeping victory, but the fact it wasn’t a defeat for the North gave Lincoln the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in the rebel states. This made ending slavery an explicit goal of the war, which up until that point had been primarily about reuniting the Union. There’s a medical museum, and an observation tower for an overview of the battlefield.
Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, is where the first shots of the war were fired, and where visitors can see Confederate submarine the HL Hunley nearby – the first combat submarine to sink a warship. Visitors can see where the spark that ignited the war took place at Harpers Ferry, a small town in West Virginia where abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the arsenal and was eventually hung for treason, and where the war officially
Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC. Top: Gettysburg
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