Defining oneself can be a complex and multifaceted process. It involves considering a wide range of factors, including one's values, beliefs, goals, experiences, and relationships. In order to truly understand who we are, we must be willing to examine these various aspects of our lives and think deeply about how they shape our identities.
One way to define oneself is through one's values. These are the principles and beliefs that guide our actions and inform our decisions. They can be as broad as a commitment to justice and equality, or as specific as a dedication to hard work and personal growth. Reflecting on our values can help us understand what is most important to us, and what we stand for as individuals.
Another important aspect of self-definition is our goals and aspirations. These are the things we hope to achieve in life, and they can range from personal fulfillment to professional success. By considering our goals, we can gain insight into our motivations and what drives us forward. We can also use our goals to help us set priorities and make decisions about how we spend our time and resources.
Our experiences are also a significant part of who we are. The things we have done, the places we have been, and the people we have encountered all shape our perspectives and understanding of the world. Reflecting on our experiences can help us understand how we have grown and changed over time, and how these experiences have influenced our worldview.
Finally, our relationships with others are a crucial part of our identity. Our relationships with family, friends, and other loved ones all contribute to who we are and how we see ourselves. These relationships can provide us with support, guidance, and a sense of belonging, and can help us to feel connected to something larger than ourselves.
In conclusion, defining oneself is a complex and ongoing process. It involves considering our values, goals, experiences, and relationships, and using this self-knowledge to guide our actions and make informed decisions about our lives. By taking the time to reflect on these various aspects of our identities, we can gain a greater understanding of who we are and what we stand for as individuals.
This Hallowed Ground
They could be cynical about everything but their own manhood, and that was somehow wrapped up in the army itself. With these decisive triumphs, the North had virtually ensured its final victory—except that the Confederates, being very doughty fighters, refused to admit it, and continued to struggle for a victory of their own, which they might very conceivably have won. Butler got troops ashore, considered taking the place by storm, then changed his mind, reembarked his soldiers, and sailed back to Hampton Roads, reporting that the fort was too strong to be taken. He must hold the ground he had conquered, with detachments here, there, and elsewhere to symbolize Federal occupancy. Lacking a better course, he dug trenches here facing the strong Yankee line and put up a hollow pretense of besieging the place.
In the end, he and his generals began to regain control over their men and made a real effort to stop the blaze. Every evening the mounted foragers would come in to camp, trailed by hundreds of wagons, buggies, and carriages which they had seized at different plantations and had loaded with foodstuffs; in the morning, when the army moved on, these would be set on fire and abandoned, symbols of the offhand hatred which the rank and file nourished for the state where secession had been born. The Petersburg lines were more than fifty miles long, running from the south of Petersburg clear around to the northeast of Richmond. On November 23 Thomas moved his army forward. The Federal army had held Nashville for the better part of three years, and had surrounded it with powerful fortifications. But the simple fact is that Hood had no good choice to make.
Just before Christmas in 1864 the Federal government had moved in to smash Fort Fisher. It had been supposed that the new monitors were shot-proof, and so a flotilla of these dumpy ironclads led the way in the first bombardment of Fort Sumter; they proved to be a good deal less than shot-proof and were so badly hammered that the naval commander, Admiral Samuel Francis Dupont, halted operations and announced that the navy alone could never in the world open Charleston Harbor. The loss and the victory were common property now. This road was hardly more than two miles long, and it bypassed the Lookout Mountain bottleneck completely. An Ohio colonel had his men form in lee of the hill, marched them twenty yards forward to fire, had them return to shelter to reload, and then moved them forward for a fresh volley. Sherman believed apparently mistakenly that Bragg was drawing men from his center to reinforce CIeburne, and he called for help. Grant returned the salute and rode away.
For time makes all but true love old; The burning thoughts that then were told Run molten still in memory's mould; And will not cool Until the heart itself be cold In Lethe's pool. In dews that heavens far distant weep Their turf may bloom; Or Genii twine beneath the deep Their coral tomb. It was a perfectly good plan, and if it had been put into operation 24 hours earlier there would have been a Union disaster of the first magnitude. The realities of trench warfare, to be sure, were such that men vastly outnumbered could hold their ground against almost any direct assault, but the stretching process could not go on forever. His own line was a wide horseshoe, bulging toward the east, a great shallow semicircle of fire and smoke and rocketing noise. The Confederate secretary of war, John C. There was among the men in his army, Sherman confessed, a very high regard for Mr.
Taken by surprise, Bragg retreated; by July 4 he had abandoned central Tennessee entirely, and a gloomy cabinet in Richmond learned that he had retreated all the way to Chattanooga. General Cleburne had been considering the plight of the South, and he had a paper to present. They never did understand, really, about slavery. Alerted just in time, Schofield turned back in retreat. A whole nation could atone for a wrong; atonement made, it could then go on, with charity and without malice, to create a new right. Burnside, as it turned out, was in no serious trouble. No torchlight procession Broadway ever saw, he said, could compare with it.
The plain was an open stage which everybody watched—the generals back on Orchard Knob, and the Confederates on Missionary Ridge. As far as he could tell, the entire battle was lost; Thomas was out of sight, to the east, probably undergoing destruction, and the only thing that mattered now was to get the survivors into Chattanooga and prepare for a last desperate stand. The blame also was perhaps a common property. The Cumberlands and the newspaper correspondents were all down in the valley, watching. When things were going badly the only visible sign he ever gave was to indulge in a quaint habit of running his fingers through his patrician gray Virginia whiskers. The attempt to make an independent Confederacy had been, in a sense, nothing more than a despairing effort to do something about the problem of slavery.
The Confederates still held Lookout, but that no longer mattered. The West was free; the terrible threat of isolation posed by secession was ended, and the farmers and traders of the continental interior no longer had to see a closed door at the mouth of the great river. If an army quartermaster at Bridgeport tried to get around this roadblock he would have to make a sixty-mile detour, sending his wagon trains north of the river through the almost impassable mountain country. There were times, indeed, when it seemed that the Union soldiers disliked each other more than they disliked the Confederates. Rosecrans detached a division from his right, where it did not seem that anything especial was going to happen; the division managed to go astray, en route to Thomas, and went wandering off in the back area somewhere, and Thomas sent word again for help. A staff officer noted that even in the heat of this furious battle Thomas sent an orderly into a nearby corn field to collect a few ears of corn for his horse, and stood watching the fight while the beast ate.
And in Washington General Grant himself got the tidings. Before they went their separate ways, Union commander and Confederate private had quite a chat. And at the upper end of Missionary Ridge, where the high country came down to the river a few miles upstream from Chattanooga, there was broken, hilly ground held by some of the best soldiers in all the Confederacy—the division of Irish-born Pat Cleburne, a tremendous soldier who had trained his men to the precise pattern which had been glimpsed by his pugnacious Irish eyes. Sherman sent off a whimsical wire to Abraham Lincoln, offering him the city of Savannah, with much war equipment and 25,000 bales of priceless cotton, as a Christmas gift. Not only in rehashing old ideas but rehashing the same ideas over and over again in its short time. Sooner or later, Lee could be made to pull his line so taut that it would break. It was generally understood that the piles of surplus were simply abandoned, purposely, so that the Negroes and poor whites could have something to eat.
:strip_icc()/pic95890.jpg)
