Category Archives: Blog

King Cotton

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Here’s a quick look at South Carolina’s addiction to cotton.  Like other kinds of junkies, its love of the white stuff led it to make rash decisions and sacrifice its future.  By the looks of it, the effects of the Civil War are still plaguing the state.

“The story of cotton itself is as interesting as the stories about its place in American history,” Cox said.

That includes cotton’s role in the Civil War. Thanks to cotton, U.S. Census data ranked South Carolina third in wealth among the states on the eve of the war. With most young men fighting, cotton production fell 96 percent during the war. And since then, South Carolina has consistently been in the bottom 10 in per capita income in the U.S.

The state’s fortunes were tied to cotton long after the war. In the 1880s, some cotton farmers went from the richest men in the state after boom years with good weather to bust in just a few years when drought returned.

via BISHOPVILLE, S.C.: Cotton may not be king, but it’s still vital to SC | State | The State.

Unfriendly Fires

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Like Wisconsin, Indiana was a Union-heavy state that contributed much in the way of men to the cause. They didn’t contribute many colored troops, though, because according to this article Indiana was quite hostile to blacks.  There is even the rumor of native black troops being poisoned.

The young Townsend, from Putnam County, bought a pie from a peddler selling them in Camp Fremont in Indianapolis where the 28th USCT was mustered in.

“I don’t know for sure, but the abolitionist press reports lots of stories in the Civil War about people deliberately selling poisoned foods to black troops,” Etcheson said. “He gets really ill and has to go back to Putnamville, where he dies in the spring of 1865. I don’t know what the illness was, but pension records link it to the pie.”

via Ball State prof asks: Was black Civil War soldier from Indiana poisoned in 1865?.

Lincoln’s War With the Press

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Lincoln’s relationship with the press was an ongoing source of drama and great quotes.  Now, Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer has released a new book on the topic, and it looks intriguing.   That revelation about Lincoln’s co-ownership of a newspaper is a particular surprise.

Throughout his career, Lincoln understood the urgency, and difficulty, of using the press, especially since during election season presidential candidates were expected to stay home and not campaign.

“Public sentiment is everything,” he said during his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, and he went to great lengths to shape that sentiment — including writing editorials himself, anonymously, and even, for a time, secretly co-owning a German-language newspaper in Illinois.

As president he spent hours tending to the prodigious egos of important newspaper editors and cultivating the goodwill of energetic young reporters. Journalists would show up at the White House, uninvited, at odd hours, and the president would have them in, put his feet up on his desk and exchange news and gossip, no matter how weary he was.

via Lessons of Abraham Lincoln’s war with the press: Commentary | masslive.com.

Long Reach of Wounds

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This is an article publicizing a reenactor’s appearance, but unlike other notices of the sort, it is very fleshed-out (emphasis on flesh). The reenactment is of a Civil War doctor, and the writer makes a point of discussing the realities beyond the wound itself, such as how saving an arm could cost a relationship 20 years later.

Richard Covell Phillips of Prattsburgh (44th New York) fought on after being wounded on the second day at Gettysburg, then made his way to a field hospital. There a doctor saved his arm, but he lost the USE of that arm. Later he and other walking wounded were ordered to make their own way on foot several miles down to town, picking their way through the decaying corpses of thousands of men, mules, and horses. After a night on the floor of a church the wounded went by train to Baltimore, where the hospitals were full. Diverted to Philadelphia he finally had his blood-soaked uniform cut away, a week or so after being wounded.

Philips stayed in the army, even serving a year or so postwar. But his wound exacted a toll from his family for decades. His oldest son wanted badly to get an extensive education, but the father insisted that he leave school as a teenager and work on the farm, doing the jobs his father couldn’t… an insistence that engendered deep bitterness.

Dr. Babcock and Dr. Annabel — Civil War Medicine Then and Now – Blogs – The Leader.

New Year’s Levees

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We celebrated the arrival of 2015 a week ago today.  Back in Lincoln’s time, January 1st was the day the White House doors were thrown open to the public and the masses thronged in to greet the inhabitants.  These White House New Year’s levees were common knowledge to me, but their desegregation never struck me as a revolutionary event until reading this article.

Every year the Lincolns threw open the doors of the White House for a New Year’s reception to which the public was invited. When a few African Americans – including Abbott and fellow physician Alexander Augusta – asserted their citizenship by attending in 1864, people inside the White House were shocked, but decorum prevailed.

The next year, however, things unfolded quite differently. By New Year’s 1865, it appeared that the abolition of slavery and the defeat of the Confederacy were at hand. For African American activists and their white allies, however, it was not enough simply to outlaw slavery. They envisioned a nation in which racism, too, would be eradicated. They wanted an end to discrimination in voting rights and law enforcement. And African Americans wanted to be treated with the same respect and dignity accorded to whites.

via Abraham Lincoln and a test of full citizenship.

Remembering the Columbia Burning

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February 17th marks the 150th anniversary of the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, and the town is memorializing the event with a series of lectures. If you live in or can get to Columbia in the next month, there are some interesting topics being covered.  Click the link below for the full list of speakers.

More than 450 buildings in Columbia were destroyed and many residents were left homeless and destitute in February 1865 after Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s troops marched with vengeance into the city.

The fire that nearly wiped out the city is the focus of two months of lectures, exhibits and tours designed to help current residents determine look back on the nation’s most devastating conflict and gauge its impact even today.

via Diverse experts, events to mark Columbia’s most devastating period | Living | The State.

Wisconsin: The Civil War years

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Wisconsin is one of those forgotten states for me – I can only spot it on the map by counting away from Illinois, and it’s never made it onto my must-see list. During the Civil War, though, it was a keystone for the Union. This short article details Wisconsin’s contributions to the Federal cause.

By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Wisconsin State Journal had been publishing for more than 20 years. But nothing could prepare Wisconsin and its nascent capital city for the horrors to follow. The country’s struggle with slavery, and the resulting war, would be the dominant issue of the time.

Families in Wisconsin and elsewhere were torn apart, as one soldier in three suffered some sort of casualty and one in every seven “gave the last full measure of devotion,” as Abraham Lincoln memorably said in his Getttysburg Address.

via The Wisconsin State Journal at 175: The Civil War years : Wsj.

A Broken Regiment

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The Smithsonian article I posted previously mentioned a new book that sounds fascinating: A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War.  The author has researched one badly mauled regiment to gauge how its veterans did after the war. Predictably, they didn’t do too well.

At war’s end, the emotional toll on returning soldiers was often compounded by physical wounds and lingering ailments such as rheumatism, malaria and chronic diarrhea. While it’s impossible to put a number on this suffering, historian Lesley Gordon followed the men of a single unit, the 16th Connecticut regiment, from home to war and back again and found “the war had a very long and devastating reach.”

The men of the 16th had only just been mustered in 1862, and barely trained, when they were ordered into battle at Antietam, the bloodiest day of combat in U.S. history. The raw recruits rushed straight into a Confederate crossfire and then broke and ran, suffering 25 percent casualties within minutes. “We were murdered,” one soldier wrote.

In a later battle, almost all the men of the 16th were captured and sent to the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, where a third of them died from disease, exposure and starvation. Upon returning home, many of the survivors became invalids, emotionally numb, or abusive of family. Alfred Avery, traumatized at Antietam, was described as “more or less irrational as long as he lived.” William Hancock, who had gone off to war “a strong young man,” his sister wrote, returned so “broken in body and mind” that he didn’t know his own name. Wallace Woodford flailed in his sleep, dreaming that he was still searching for food at Andersonville. He perished at age 22, and was buried beneath a headstone that reads: “8 months a sufferer in Rebel prison; He came home to die.”

 

A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War (Conflicting Words: New Dimensions of the American Civil War): Lesley J. Gordon: 9780807157305: Amazon.com: Books.

Civil War PTSD

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The Smithsonian Magazine investigates post-traumatic stress disorder amongst Civil War vets.  The condition was not understood then, and as the article states, “had a long reach”; effects were felt on individuals, families and communities long after the firing ceased.

“We’ve tended to see soldiers in the 1860s as stoic and heroic—monuments to duty, honor and sacrifice,” says Lesley Gordon, editor of Civil War History, a leading academic journal that recently devoted a special issue to wartime trauma. “It’s taken a long time to recognize all the soldiers who came home broken by war, just as men and women do today.”

Counting these casualties and diagnosing their afflictions, however, present considerable challenges. The Civil War occurred in an era when modern psychiatric terms and understanding didn’t yet exist. Men who exhibited what today would be termed war-related anxieties were thought to have character flaws or underlying physical problems. For instance, constricted breath and palpitations—a condition called “soldier’s heart” or “irritable heart”—was blamed on exertion or knapsack straps drawn too tightly across soldiers’ chests.

via Did Civil War Soldiers Have PTSD? | History | Smithsonian.

The Irish in the Civil War

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This article by the Irish Independent points out that the first Union private and the last Union general killed in the war were both Irish.  It’s a brief look at the impact Irish immigrants had on the American cataclysm.

They reckon that 210,000 Irish soldiers fought in British uniform in the First World War, and that 49,300 were killed. Yet almost as many Irishmen fought in the American Civil War – 200,000 in all, 180,000 in the Union army, 20,000 for the Confederates. An estimated 20 per cent of the Union navy were Irish-born – 26,000 men – and the total Irish dead of the American conflict came to at least 30,000. Many of the Irish fatalities were from Famine families who had fled the desperate poverty of their homes in what was then the United Kingdom, only to die at Antietam and Gettysburg. My old alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, is collating the figures and they are likely to rise much higher as Irish academics mine into the American Compiled Military Service Records for the regiments of both sides.

via A timely reminder of the bloody anniversary we all forgot – Comment – Voices – The Independent.