Across Five Aprils

Chapter 11

Vocabulary Words

affront

degradation

obscurity

tenacity

aghast

deluded

pardon

terrain

amnesty

desolation

preponderance

traitorous

annals

detractors

proclamation

treason

bewildering

dissolution

prominence

vicious

chaotic

folly

provender

vindictiveness

clemency

inevitable

relegated

vivid

complicity

invective

retraction

wholesale

cynically

jubilation

rhetorically

 

decisive

narrative

siege

 

Below are sentences or phrases in which the vocabulary words are contained within the text of Chapter 11 of Beyond Five Aprils.

Read each sentence or phrase and see if you can determine the definition by the context in which it is used in the sentence, if you do not already know the meaning of the word.

  • to accept else would be an insult and an affront to the thousands of soldiers who had died in battle
  • I gave a yell when I read it, and your sister was aghast
  • In December Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation of amnesty, in which he promised pardon and full rights to any individual Confederate who would swear to protect the Constitution and the Union of the states
  • Another said that the President’s speech would live among the annals of man
  • Rosecrans, McCook, and Crittenden, who in the bewildering mountain terrain had completely lost control of the men they were supposed to command, were now accused of everything from downright stupidity to traitorous complicity with the enemy
  • The newspaper accounts were hard for both her and Jethro to understand; they were stories of chaotic confusion, of bitter fighting and terrible disaster
  • there would be fighting to the last ditch, but the end was inevitable. A people pushed to the extremities that existed in the South could not possibly hold on, the papers claimed. But they did hold on, and as the war trailed drearily on, vindictiveness toward the stubborn stand of the seceding states grew steadily more bitter in the North. This vindictiveness was urged on by men in high places who resented the President’s spirit of clemency as violently as they resented the tenacity of the South
  • Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, loyal still to McClellan, had nodded cynically at the advent of Grant
  • The country had waited expectantly that summer to hear of a decisive victory
  • Congress cried out that if the Washington government called for restoration of the Union it was merely setting a cruel trap for the deluded; that it would be only a relationship between the conqueror and the conquered; that it would mean personal and public degradation and ruin
  • During the dreary days in which she had heard nothing from her husband, the name Chickamauga had held desolation and despair for Nancy
  • His proclamation of amnesty was little better than treason, the President’s detractors shouted, and many people began to consider it high patriotism to talk of the coming wholesale execution of rebels
  • If the price of peace was the dissolution of the Union, many people felt that compensation lay in stopping human slaughter
  • It would have been folly to give up with victory so near
  • Jethro had been barely conscious of the excitement, anger, and vicious invective that had accompanied the election of 1860
  • After the hope and jubilation that Vicksburg and Gettysburg had inspired in July, Chickamauga was a dreadful reversal for the North to suffer
  • After that, John’s letter was a long narrative of what had happened in the mountains around Chattanooga
  • General Halleck, who had never quite risen to his position, was finally relegated to the list of those whose names had soared for a while and then fallen into near-obscurity
  • The preponderance of the soldier vote was for Lincoln
  • names of men and places that for a time were on everybody’s tongue and then quite often were almost forgotten, while other names gained prominence in the news
  • made it impossible for a wagonload of food or provender to get through to either men or animals
  • Jubilantly the news came: Petersburg was in Grant’s hands! Then a retraction: Petersburg was not quite in Grant’s hands -- only the outworks. And finally: a siege would be necessary before the city would be in Grant’s hands
  • and of Editor Horace Greeley, who asked rhetorically if this man Lincoln was the sole hope of the Republican Party
  • It was a vivid picture