Luke Ledbetter- History 1700
	The Civil War is one of my favorite parts of history. It was such an important and prevalent part of our history and it really helped define America as the country it is today. Ending slavery was one of the biggest movements in American history and this was the biggest turning point towards that. 
	I chose picture #201. It is the picture showing the hanging of 4 people charged with conspiracy. This picture took me by surprise when I clicked on the link because I didn’t expect to see them actually hanging. This picture shows me that America takes things like treason and conspiracy very seriously (Alexander Gardner, online image). Yet the thing that struck me as the most interesting is how common of an occurrence it seems to be. The picture gives it an outlook of a public gathering of sorts. There are soldiers, which gives off the impression along with the large brick building and nature of the event that they are at a fort, but there are also people that look like regular citizens in the crowd. 
	As stated before, the main inference I made was how common the event seems to be in the picture. With citizens and soldiers standing by, four people lose their lives for conspiracy. This is something that does not ever take place in public in our times, but it seems like everyone in attendance is used to it. For these people it does not seem like a gruesome event, they seem completely used to the concept, which also leads one to believe this is something, that takes place often. Common outings for American citizens today are movies and concerts, but nothing that would be so revealing as the hanging of four people, as this would be considered socially unacceptable in a public setting for our time.
	The Texas State Library and Archives Commission provide a glimpse into hangings in that time frame. There are several different hangings listed in Texas alone, not even of the whole country. “Local authorities conducted a mass arrest of suspected Unionists and took them to Gainesville, the county seat, and tried them for treason and
Insurrection. Seven were sentenced to hang (“Under the Rebel Flag…” 2011, online). These men were hung just for their beliefs in a different type of governmental structure, which is a kind of opposition we never see today. The very next sentence shows how law was completely disregarded in these times by stating “At that point, the citizens grew weary of the slowness of the legal process and lynched 14 more without trial”, (“Under the Rebel Flag…” 2011, online). This further deviates how the public was “used to” or even approved of these happenings. 
	The photograph I chose really brings to light the amount of death that was going on in the Civil War. It states, “618,000 Americans died… There were nearly 2,000 deaths for every 100,000 of population” (Brinkley 2012, 354). That is an astounding number of people who are dying in only a four-year time frame. Death had to have seemed so relevant that the citizens and soldiers were becoming immune to it or even just complacent about it. The regular citizens in my photograph were probably so used to people dying that there weren’t as much sadness involved unless a loved one had passed. I can’t imagine that being a reality. The book also states that in World War I that there were only one hundred and nine deaths to every one hundred thousand of the population and in World War II there were two hundred and forty one. This paints the Civil War as an extremely gruesome war seeing that there is such a large death rate. 
	This picture and assignment really opened my eyes to the brutality of the Civil War. I hadn’t known that such large figures were involved as far as the death rate goes. Hangings were commonplace and were probably celebrated if the people being hung were “conspirators” or had committed treason in the area of the country they lived in. Its hard to understand reality’s like this when we live in such a different of our own. 

Bibliography
Alexander Gardner, Execution of the four persons condemned as conspirators, National Archives and Records Administration, online image. http://www.archives.gov/research/military/civil-war/photos/images/civil-war-201.jpg

“Under the Rebel Flag: Life in Texas During the Civil War,” The Texas State Library and Archives Commission, August 2011 https://www.tsl.state.tx.us/exhibits/civilwar/dissent.html