The American Civil War

[fhl]

When i said in my previous post that the war was all about money i didn't mean to imply that that is why the south seceded. The south made it plain that they seceded over states rights and slavery.

Also, there were plenty of abolitionists in the north that joined up with the union army to fight slavery. I was just making a case that Lincoln and his political allies and backers went to war over money and I believe the facts back up that conclusion.

When I read about Lincoln throwing political enemies in jail and shutting down newspapers and suspending habeus corpus and all the rest it makes me roll my eyes when he is lionized.

 

[budcampbell]

Quote from fhl:

When i said in my previous post that the war was all about money i didn't mean to imply that that is why the south seceded. The south made it plain that they seceded over states rights and slavery.

Also, there were plenty of abolitionists in the north that joined up with the union army to fight slavery. I was just making a case that Lincoln and his political allies and backers went to war over money and I believe the facts back up that conclusion.

When I read about Lincoln throwing political enemies in jail and shutting down newspapers and suspending habeus corpus and all the rest it makes me roll my eyes when he is lionized.

Lincoln is a hero only in the minds of those who write history in their eyes, not cold hard facts. His fate was sealed, unfortunately for him.

 

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Jennie Wade, the only civilian casualty at the battle of Gettysburg.

 

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Chattanooga, Tenn., vicinity. Federal camp by the Tennessee River. LOC Summary: Photograph of the War in the West. These photographs are of the Battle of Chattanooga, September-November 1863.

Chattanooga, Tenn. Confederate prisoners at railroad depot. LOC Summary: Photograph of the War in the West. These photographs are of the Battle of Chattanooga, September-November 1863.

 

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Civil War Veterans Come Alive in Audio and Video Recordings

 

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• Mourning rituals. Wartime convention decreed that a woman mourn her child’s death for one year, a brother’s death for six months, and a husband’s death for two and a half years. She progressed through prescribed stages of heavy, full, and half mourning, with gradually loosening requirements of dress and behavior. Mary Todd Lincoln remained in deep mourning for more than a year after her son Willie’s death, dressing in black veils, black crepe and black jewelry. Flora Stuart, the widow of Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, remained in heavy morning for 59 years after the 1864 death of her husband, wearing black until she died in 1923. By contrast, a widower was expected to mourn for only three months, simply by displaying black crepe on his hat or armband.

• Glowing wounds. After the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, soldiers reported a peculiar phenomenon: glow-in-the-dark wounds. More than 16,000 soldiers from both armies were wounded during the battle, and neither Union nor Confederate medical personnel were prepared for the carnage. Soldiers lay in the mud for two rainy days, and many of them noticed that their wounds glowed in the dark. In fact, the injured whose wounds glowed seemed to heal better than the others. In 2001, two Maryland teenagers solved the mystery (and won a top prize at an international science fair). The wounded became hypothermic, and their lowered body temperatures made ideal conditions for a bioluminescent bacterium called Photorhabdus luminescens, which inhibits pathogens.

• After President Abraham Lincoln died, on April 15, 1865, his leather wallet was found to contain a $5 Confederate bill, imprinted with the image of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Lincoln may have gotten the bill when he visited Petersburg and Richmond earlier in the month.

 

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Pauline Cushman, Union Spy

Born in New Orleans, Pauline Cushman was a struggling 30-year-old actress in 1863. While performing in Louisville, Kentucky, she was dared by Confederate officers to interrupt a show to toast Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. Cushman contacted the Union Army’s local provost marshal and offered to perform the toast as a way to ingratiate herself to the Confederates and become a federal intelligence operative. The marshal agreed, and she gave the toast the next evening.

The Union immediately sent Cushman to federally occupied Nashville, where she began her work with the Army of the Cumberland. She gathered information about enemy operations, identified Confederate spies and served as a federal courier before she came under suspicion by the Confederates and was arrested. She was sentenced to hang but was saved by the unexpected arrival of Union forces at Shelbyville. Because of the attention she received, Cushman was forced to stop her work.

After the war, Cushman tried acting again and gave monologues on the war, sometimes while wearing a uniform. As the public’s interest in Cushman faded, she supported herself as a seamstress but became addicted to morphine after an illness. She died of an overdose at the age of 60 and was buried with military honors by the Veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic in their cemetery in San Francisco.

 

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Belle Boyd, Confederate Spy

One of the most famous Confederate spies, Belle Boyd was born to a prominent slaveholding family near Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), in 1843. At the age of 17, she was arrested for shooting a Union soldier who had broken into her family’s home and insulted her mother. Though Union officers investigated and cleared her of all charges, they watched her closely after that. Young and attractive, Boyd used her charms to get information from the officers, which she passed along to the Confederacy.

After repeated warnings to disengage in covert activities, Boyd was sent by Union officials to live with family in Front Royal, Virginia. Soon after her arrival, she began working as a courier between Confederate generals Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and P.G.T. Beauregard. Jackson credited the intelligence she provided with helping him win victories in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862.

In July 1862, Boyd was arrested by Union forces and sent to Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. She was released a month later and deported to Richmond, but she was soon caught behind federal lines and imprisoned for three more months. In 1864 she was arrested again while trying to smuggle Confederate papers to England. She fled the country and a few months later married Samuel W. Hardinge, one of the Union naval officers who had detained her. Hardinge returned briefly to the United States and was imprisoned as a suspected Southern spy. He died soon after his release.

Boyd, now a widow, wrote her two-volume memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, in 1865 and embarked on an acting career, often telling of her clandestine experiences during the war. She remarried twice and died in Wisconsin in 1900.