The fascinating tale of one poor sap who got caught up in the maelstrom of the Civil War. I’d never heard of Charles Heidsieck before today, but I see there’s both a book and a movie about him. That’s fitting, as my first thought on reading the article was, “man, this is a tale worthy of a movie!”

But seeing the European market saturated by the older Champagne houses, he set his sights on a new sales territory: the U.S. As the first Champagne man to actively promote his bubbles in America in 1852, Charles Heidsieck quickly became a phenomenon, going by “Champagne Charlie.” Huge galas were held in his honor with Champagne flowing freely not only in aristocratic New England, but also in the food-and-wine-loving city of New Orleans.

By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, he had sold more than 300,000 bottles of Champagne in the U.S. However, the war proved challenging for the collection of debts, and upon his 1861 return to New York, he was told by his sales agent he couldn’t collect debts from the South because of a wartime Act of Congress. In a desperate situation, Charles took a circuitous route around the active war areas through Kansas and down to New Orleans to collect the debt himself.

Source: Going Grape: Civil War nearly ended a Champagne house

At the start of what promises to be a tumultuous election year, the BBC looks back at the 1864 campaign; one of the most important votes in American history.

On 22 August 1864, with just two and a half months to go before election day, President Lincoln received a stark warning from the chairman of his campaign committee: “The tide is strongly against us,” reported Henry J Raymond. The country was facing the prospect of falling “into hostile hands”.

For the president’s supporters, winning re-election was every bit as vital as securing success on the battlefield. Elections were the manifestation of the ‘government by the people’ for which the war was being fought. But at the same time, the ‘right’ side had to triumph. “For four summers the loyal North has been firing bullets at the rebellion,” ran a typical editorial. “The time has now come to fire ballots.” Support for Lincoln was made inseparable from national loyalty; to oppose him was tantamount to treason. Never in American history has there been a presidential election with such high stakes.

When Abraham Lincoln stood for re-election in November 1864 he knew that defeat could bring the civil war to a premature end and shatter his dreams of abolishing slavery. And, as Adam IP Smith reveals

Source: Lincoln: The vote that saved America

Here’s a short biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe with one hell of an opening line:

Fifty dollars in Cincinnati changed the course of this country.

That was the prize for a short-story contest hosted by “Western Monthly” in 1833. And that’s exactly what Harriet Beecher Stowe took home for her winning “Uncle Lot” tale.

It was the 22-year-old schoolmistress’ first triumph with her pen. And from that moment, Stowe spent her spare moments with her pen to paper.

Source: Cincinnati and the ‘little woman’ who started the Civil War

From the always-excellent CBC Sunday Edition, Civil War historian Eric Foner discusses the Know-Nothings and how they compare to Donald Trump’s populist revolution. Foner’s always interesting and the parallels are both striking and terrifying.

Historian Eric Foner says Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiment is a recurring strand of thought in America.

Source: Donald Trump and the “Know-Nothing” movement

I’d been reading reports and watching footage of today’s horrors in Brussels, without realising that my soundtrack was The Devil Knows How To Ride. I’ve been listening to the audiobook biography of William Clarke Quantrill this week, and the chapter on the Lawrence Massacre was running in the background when I got distracted with the news reports. A chilling convergence of modern atrocities and a gone but not forgotten American terrorist. I’m going to switch over to some pop music for a few days, I think.

Source: Lawrence Massacre – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Some interesting facts about Civil War headstones in this article, which discusses the replacement of some unusual grave markers near Petersburg:

1. They are way longer than I expected them to be!
2. A civil servant during the Depression convinced the government to save on all that unseen marble by laying headstones flat on the ground. (Which is why the ones in question are being replaced.)
3. Old headstones are ground up rather than preserved, by law.

(None of these were covered in Drew Faust’s excellent work about Civil War death and remembrance, This Republic of Suffering, though it is an excellent look at changes to the social customs around death wrought by the war’s tremendous casualty list.)

Stumbled across this recorded lecture while doing some research, and was quite taken with it. It’s easy to think of the seceded states as being unified entities, and to forget that there were many cultural, social, geographic, economic and political differences going on beneath the field of red on a map. This is well worth an hour of your time.

While many think of antebellum Alabama as a state of magnolias and cotton plantations, that picture tells only part of the story. This program will show how three groups – white yeomen farmers, planter elites, and enslaved African Americans – together created the “cotton state” in Alabama.

Source: ArchiTreats – Free Podcast by Alabama Learning Exchange (ALEX) on iTunes

Here’s one for nerds like myself who love the logic of libraries as well as the holdings!

I specialized (NB: One up from “majored”) in history at university, but due to some scheduling conflicts with sabbatical-ing profs, I missed out on the chance to take a pure Civil War course. That didn’t stop me from raiding the well-stocked library shelves for pleasure reads. I still head automatically to the 973 section whenever I check out a new library, but I’d never understood all the numbers involved after the famous decimal.  This page does a really nifty job of explaining, by way of a clickable path.

One of the other courses I missed out on was a Historiography course; the study of the historians who shape the study of the war. This e-book
from Amazon looks like it could be an interesting read.

Source: MDS: 973.78 | LibraryThing

The answer to a question I didn’t think to ask: Why is Lincoln’s birthday not a separate holiday? Lost Cause and long memories, of course. Here’s a little look at the history of the Presidents Day holiday.

There is no US Presidents’ Day. We don’t care what the guy on red-white-and-blue stilts is saying on QVC. Some states call it that, but they can’t even agree on the apostrophe – is it President’s, or Presidents’, or Presidents? Nobody knows.

Source: Happy Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday! Now get back to work.

Pictured above is a painting – thought to be the only one done by an eyewitness – of Lincoln being carried out of Ford’s Theatre. Nice to hear that it’s being restored with the intention of hanging it in the Theatre museum, and interesting to read about the history of it – it seems to have been a painting no one wanted to see.

The painting, in oil on canvas, has been in family hands and in storage for much of its existence — perhaps because the scene it depicted was too painful, some believe. It belonged to the White House for a time, but it’s not clear whether it was ever displayed. Since 1978, it has been in the hands of the Park Service, and lately it has been in storage in the service’s Museum Resource Center in suburban Maryland. It was last exhibited four years ago in Russia, at shows comparing the lives of Lincoln and Cz

Source: Lincoln assassination emerges in painting from 150 years of grime – The Washington Post