I’ve been reading more about John Brown’s Raid, and came across this first-hand account. The author, Osborne Perry Anderson, was the only surviving African-American who took part in the raid. Google has provided scans of the original book in its entirety (isn’t the Internet great?) I’ll add it to The Library.
The New York Times’ Disunion series has a great entry on Cump Sherman and his mental illness. Sherman has long been my favourite Civil War personality, due in large part to his personality, and his personality was hugely determined by his bipolar disorder. Luckily for him – and us – he shared Lincoln’s ability to pull himself out of a major depressive episode to change the course of American history.
In letters to his wife, Ellen Ewing Sherman, Sherman himself confirmed and amplified what others observed. Everyone around him seemed poised to betray him, he wrote her. “I am up all night.” He had lost his appetite. Viewing his situation from the perspective of this mental turmoil, he was convinced that he was caught in an impossible military contradiction where “to advance would be madness and to stand still folly.” And he entirely lacked the means to lead others and to control himself: “I find myself riding a whirlwind unable to guide the storm.” In the near future he anticipated total “failure and humiliation,” an onrushing infamy that “nearly makes me crazy — indeed I may be so now.”
This chronicle of his breakdown also sheds more light on Sherman’s deep loathing of reporters!
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/shermans-demons/?smid=fb-disunion
NPR unearthed an interesting story on a very rare, newly-inducted United Daughter of the Confederacy.
Mattie Clyburn Rice, 88, spent years searching through archives to prove her father was a black Confederate. As she leafs through a notebook filled with official-looking papers, Rice stops to read a faded photocopy with details of her father’s military service.
“At Hilton Head while under fire of the enemy, he carried his master out of the field of fire on his shoulder, that he performed personal service for Robert E. Lee. That was his pension record,” Rice says.
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/07/138587202/after-years-of-research-confederate-daughter-arises
A lucky Tampa man has been bequeathed a collection of Civil War letters, written by several Union soldiers to a female relative in Pennsylvania. The excerpts published in this article give a good taste of the soldier’s mindset, and appear to cover many of the biggest events of the war. The owner indicates that his first step will be reading them all. I hope his second involves preparing them for publication!
Well Mary, we got good news this morning that the rebel General Johnston has surrendered to Sherman. If this story is true, we will soon get home. I think the last battle has been fought. I don’t want to hear another cannon fired.
The house of the Civil War veteran (and curiosity) Albert Cashier is being renovated. Cashier was the Union veteran who served throughout the war and received a pension, and was revealed only in old age to be a woman.
I find this story interesting, not only because of the Cashier history, but because the renovations are being done in a small town with some very open-minded residents. Gender confusion is a topic that makes a lot of people uncomfortable (to say nothing of how the gender-confused must feel) and it’s nice to see volunteers preserving a local history that might be considered contentious with such dedication and devotion.
http://www.pantagraph.com/news/local/article_96032f08-b183-11df-96d7-001cc4c03286.html
I first read Grant’s Memoirs as a teenager, and remember them as being both engaging and accessible. As one who was (and is, to this day) easily put off by the flowery, verbose prose common to novels from the Victorian era, it was refreshing to read Grant’s simple and conversational writing. You feel you’re getting the essence of the man; Plain and taciturn, yet exuding a deep strength of character and a warm humanism. Judging by the personality demonstrated here, Grant would have been a nice guy to share a beer with, or – knowing what we do of Grant’s foibles – perhaps a lemonade instead.
The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant are available as a free download from Project Gutenberg.