Category Archives: Blog

On Stage at Ford’s

Posted on by
1

Someone has posted this amazing letter written by Harry Hawk, one of the actors performing at the play when Booth shot Lincoln. In fact, he was the only actor onstage when Booth jumped out of the box.

My Dear Parents,

This is the first time I have had to write to you since the assassination of our dear President on Friday night, as I have been in custody nearly ever since, I was one of the principal witnesses of that sad affair, being the only one on the stage at the time of the fatal shot. I was playing Asa Trenchard, in the “American Cousin,” The “old lady” of the theatre had just gone off the stage, and I was answering her exit speech when I heard the shot fired. I turned, looked up at the President’s box, heard the man exclaim, “Sic semper tyrannis,” saw him jump from the box, seize the flag on the staff and drop to the stage; he slipped when he gained the stage, but got upon his feet in a moment, brandished a large knife, saying, “The South shall be free!” turned his face in the direction I stood, and I recognized him as John Wilkes Booth. He ran toward me, and I, seeing the knife, thought I was the one he was after, ran off the stage and up a flight of stairs. He made his escape out of a door, directly in the rear of the theatre, mounted a horse and rode off…

The whole letter can be read after the click.

via How did Lincoln’s assassination affect ticket sales of “Our American Cousin” : AskHistorians.

The Smell of the Civil War

Posted on by
1

A short article from Smithsonian.com mentions an intriguing new book.  Given the subject, I’m guessing it will be a lot like the morose yet fascinating This Republic of Suffering.  I’ve added it to my wish list.

Caroline Hancock was 23 when she served as a nurse after the Battle of Gettysburg, in 1863. She found the smell of the decaying bodies so strong that “she viewed it as an oppressive, malignant force, capable of killing the wounded men who were forced to lie amid the corpses until the medical corps could reach them,” writes Rebecca Onion for Slate’s history blog, The Vault. Hancock’s account is published in a new book called The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War, by Mark Smith, a history professor at the University of South Carolina.

via A Nurse Describes the Smell of the Civil War | Smart News | Smithsonian.

Children of Civil War Veterans

Posted on by
1

National Geographic interviews the children of Civil War veterans.  As I’ve posted before, incredibly there are still some living.  There’s a short video that accompanies this article which is worth the click-through.

Extraordinary even among this exclusive group of Civil War children are four surviving siblings from the same family: Charles Parker Pool’s sons, John, Garland, and William, and his daughter, Florence Wilson. Their father served in the Union’s Sixth West Virginia Infantry.

via Children of Civil War Veterans Still Walk Among Us, 150 Years After the War.

Douglass in Ireland

Posted on by
1

I was in Europe this year, and kept running into “Frederick Douglass spoke here” plaques. I didn’t see any in Ireland, though there are plenty of Daniel O’Connell commemorations. Turns out the two men had a very complicated relationship through the 1840s. Salon documents it and the Irish/American/Negro complications that came out of the troubles Ireland faced at that time.

Frederick Douglass’ four-month Irish sojourn – he traveled to Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Belfast in 1845, part of a two-year stay in the United Kingdom – has long fascinated historians and others who care about human rights. Douglass crossed paths with the great Irish “Liberator,” Daniel O’Connell, a champion of his own people and also an abolitionist, who the younger leader praised as a mentor and an inspiration throughout most of his life. He flourished in Ireland, where he was seen as a man, not “chattel.” Mixing with intellectual elites, he – and they – realized that the auto-didact and former slave could more than hold his own. A statue of Douglass stands proudly in Cork’s University College today.

“I can truly say,” he wrote to his abolitionist ally (and sometimes antagonist) William Lloyd Garrison, “I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country, I seem to have undergone a transformation, I live a new life.”

Yet comparatively little is known about what Douglass thought and felt about the most pressing Irish issues of that time – the fight to repeal the Act of Union with Great Britain, which had stripped the native Irish Catholic majority of many rights, and the gathering storm of the catastrophic potato famine. In the years around his visit, famine or its attendant diseases killed at least a million Irish and sent two million more fleeing the country. The potato blight was only a rumor and a worry when Douglass visited Ireland in 1845, but it was a crisis by the time he left England in 1847 to return to the U.S. How could such a towering human rights figure remain silent on the catastrophe, as it seemed he had?

via Frederick Douglass’ Irish sojourn: A bracing look at his encounters with poverty and prejudice across the Atlantic – Salon.com.

Alonzo Cushing, MOH

Posted on by
Reply

Breaking my travel-imposed silence to post this news about Alonzo Cushing being awarded the Medal of Honor.  Cushing’s one of the lowest-ranked Gettysburg veterans I can name, and almost every book on the battle will mention his brave actions in the face of his mounting wounds.

I wonder if this opens the door to his brother, William, getting one too?

Despite two severe wounds, Cushing, 22, stayed at his post and directed artillery fire upon hordes of Confederates charging the center of the Union line at Cemetery Ridge — a doomed assault known as Pickett’s Charge. A bullet to the head finally felled the young officer.

More than 151 years after his heroic service, Cushing will receive the Medal of Honor posthumously, the White House announced Tuesday.

via 151 years later, Medal of Honor for hero – CNN.com.

AMA with Dr. James McPherson

Posted on by
Reply

Reddit is a fairly recent obsession for me, and one of the reasons I love it is special events like their AMAs (“Ask Me Anything”).  Tomorrow, James McPherson will be answering Redditors’ questions on the Civil War.  If you’ve ever dreamed of asking the professor a question, or in making a ridiculous LOL-joke to him, now is your chance!  (Note that you will need to create a Reddit account to ask questions.)

AMA Announcement — Dr. James McPherson, author of ‘Battle Cry of Freedom’ (1988) and over a dozen other books on the American Civil War, will be here to answer questions this Friday, Feb. 28th, starting at 1:30PM : AskHistorians.

John Yates Beall

Posted on by
Reply

I find the conspiracy theories around Lincoln’s assassination pretty fascinating. There is so much we don’t know – due in large part to Stanton’s interference with evidence in the case – that many connections or ideas become plausible. I noticed a mention of John Yates Beall while perusing Wikipedia, and found this little tidbit in his biography.

There is a legend discussed by Lloyd Lewis that Lincoln was approached by John Wilkes Booth, who was a friend of Beall’s, to save his life, and that the President agreed to do so. But Lincoln changed his mind (the legend goes) when he was approached by his friend and Secretary of State William Henry Seward, who insisted that Beall’s activities had been dangerous to the citizens of New York State (Seward’s state). Supposedly a furious Booth determined to kill Lincoln and Seward for this betrayal after Beall was executed.

John Yates Beall – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Alexandria, Virginia

Posted on by
Reply

This is an interesting chronicle of life in Alexandria, Virginia – just a short walk from downtown Washington, DC.  During the war it was Confederate territory, occupied by the Union.  Citizens and returning soldiers write about their lives on the front line of the Confederate homefront.

Voices from the Past, Alexandria, Virginia 1861-1865 | Fort Ward Museum & Historic Site | City of Alexandria, VA.