Tag Archives: neat-facts

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.

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.

Children of Civil War Veterans

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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.

Civil War Medical Implements

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NB: This is another post that might not be of interest to the squeamish.  Sorry – bit of a trend this week, apparently!

I usually avoid the Daily Mail, but this “article” was too good to pass up.  Please ignore all the Kardashian-heavy gossip stories on the right and check out this fascinating collection of photos.  The writer has assembled images relating to Civil War medicine and hospitals.  There’s not a ton of background information or detail, but they’ve been well chosen for theme.  Lots of new-to-me images here, and some really intriguing ones, to boot.

 

Civil war surgery: The grisly photos that show how wounded soldiers were treated | Mail Online.

Waterloo Teeth

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Here’s a story to chill the blood.  If you’re squeamish, look away!

There was an offhand mention in a Reddit conversation about teeth that sent me scouring the web for an article that Smithsonian magazine no longer has archived.  The gist of it is in this macabre webpage:

By this time, the first porcelain teeth had begun to appear. To start with they were too white, too brittle and made a horrid grating noise. Then, in 1837, London denture maker Claudius Ash, driven by his hatred of handling dead men’s teeth, perfected porcelain dentures and began to manufacture them commercially. Even so, trade in the real thing continued well into the second half of the century. Supplies increased during the Crimean War of the 1850s and in 1865 the Pall Mall Gazette reported that some London dentists still refused to switch to porcelain. They now had a whole new source: on the other side of the Atlantic the tooth robbers were hard at work, cleaning up behind the armies of the American Civil War.

And here I thought the worst of the battlefield ghouls just stole haversacks and shoes.  Shudder.

via Waterloo Teeth.

Hay and Nico, Together at Last

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I’m working on a special project for 2014, and went looking for a photo of John Hay and John Nicolay – Lincoln’s secretaries.  There’s one famous photo of them with Lincoln between them, but shockingly, given their half-century friendship, there are none of the BFFs together.  However, one eagle-eyed websurfer has found them together, amongst the crowd in the Second Inaugural photo. They both look solemn and stressed. Thinking, no doubt, of all the paperwork awaiting them back at the office.

 

 

Lincoln’s Second Inauguration Photo…Again.

The CSN’s Sunk Plans for the Great Lakes

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This interesting piece of what-if history discusses a scuttled Confederate plot to target Northern shipping ports on the Great Lakes. My first reaction was to scoff at how little impact one steamer could have, but then I remembered The Alabama.

There was, however, an opportunity. In order to avoid an arms race on the Great Lakes, in 1817, the United States and Britain agreed to demilitarize them. In the Rush-Bagot Agreement, both nations agreed to maintain only a handful of small armed vessels on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain. By 1863, there was only one American warship on the Great Lakes: the 14-gun steamboat USS Michigan, which is pictured above.

If the Confederate Navy could hijack the Michigan and crew it with skilled sailors, it could ravage American forces on the Great Lakes unopposed by the United States Navy.

via The Confederate Navy’s Crazy Plan to Raid the Great Lakes – Neatorama.

▶ The Kennesaw Line

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I was reading Sam Watkins’ Wikipedia entry when I noticed this neat little mention:

The song “Kennesaw Line” by Don Oja-Dunaway, tells a heart-breaking vignette of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain on the morning of June 27, from the perspective of Sam Watkins,[3] with part of the lyrics directly paraphrasing his description from the book “Company Aytch” (see the section entitled “Dead Angle, on the Kennesaw Line”).

Of course, YouTube provides a rendition of it.

▶ The Kennesaw Line – YouTube.

Tennis Swings

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Some literal gallows humor in the title, there:  If you zoom in on the embedded map, you’ll be able to see the tennis courts at Fort Lesley J. McNair, in Washington.  At the time of the Civil War, these courts were the site of the Washington Arsenal, and it was on this exact ground in 1865 that the Lincoln conspirators were hanged.

From funeral black to tennis whites.

 


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38.86654,-77.017433 – Google Maps.