Southern sympathizers in the North were referred to as “doughfaces”. Despite being an etymology fan, I’d never thought to research the word’s origin ’til now. It’s pretty great. Here’s the short answer:
The term doughface originally referred to an actual mask made of dough, but came to be used in a disparaging context for someone, especially a politician, who is perceived to be pliable and moldable.
There’s a full history of the word that’s worth a read at the link below.
There was a neat find near Savannah this month:
Archeologists working for the Army Corps of Engineers, Savannah District, aided by divers and salvage operations teams from the Navy, retrieved a 64-square-foot section of a Civil War ironclad warship from the bottom of the Savannah River, the evening of Nov. 12.
The divers worked in strong currents with near-zero visibility during a week to assess the possibility of lifting a small piece of the Confederate ship’s casemate for archeological testing.
A crane lifted it onto a barge anchored near historic Old Fort Jackson on the eastern edge of Savannah. Experts estimate the piece weighs more than 5,000 pounds.
FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS. For a “SMALL PIECE… of the casement.” This helps put the ironclads into some more perspective, though clearly I need a lot more to fully grasp how heavy these behemoths were.
No, not the spurious set of “coincidences” (some of which are blatant lies) that was promulgated in the ’60s, but some interesting history on the Kennedy funeral. Turns out JFK laid in state on the same catafalque that held Lincoln’s body, and the caisson that transported his coffin was also used in the Lincoln ceremonies.
That’s it for the Civil War history in this article, but it’s an interesting read regardless. This week has been a reminder that the 1960s were as tumultuous for America as the 1860s, and as a direct result of what happened during that decade.
Here’s a fact about slavery that is new to me: The Slave Tag.
In Charleston, S.C., slave owners could rent out the services of their slaves to others for a fee. The registration fee for slave tags brought income to the city of Charleston. To oversee the slave trade, slaves in Charleston were required to wear a slave tag or identification marker. Fees for the tags, like a license, were set based on the abilities and skills of the slave.
By law, the slave tag had to be worn at all times during the calendar year marked on the tag.
via Art and Antiques: Dark history told through slave tags – News – Republican Herald.
This is the interesting story of a blockade runner with a full c.v. From its christening in Glasgow to its suspicious scuttling outside Oregon, the ship has an interesting history. Some of the war’s inanimate objects have some interesting stories to tell.
Ten days into its new career as a Navy ship, the Gertrude captured the blockade runner Warrior after a nine-hour chase. Then it sank the Ellen the following January, followed the next year by the Eco. The Gertrude’s brush with stardom came when it almost caught the legendary Confederate runner Denbigh, which only managed to get away by pitching $10,000 worth of cotton overboard to lighten the cargo load.
After the war, though, the Gertrude’s glory days were over. Technology had raced ahead in the few years since it was built. What had been the fastest thing in the Gulf of Mexico back in 1863 was now just another aging, slowish, tiny, obsolete freighter.
Now re-named the Gussie Telfair, the old warhorse soldiered on for twenty mundane years making the Portland-Victoria run before finally being sold to Frank Bernard and put to work out of Coos Bay.
And that, of course, led to what was very likely an undignified little bit of dirty work in the line of insurance fraud, and the end of a once-proud warrior that had done a yeoman’s job on both sides in the war of the century.
Here’s one of those children of Civil War veterans I mentioned in an article a while back. Fascinating to get a glimpse of the pension process; making sure in 1929 that no oath of allegiance to the Union was sworn in the 1860s.
Lindsey didn’t apply for a state pension from Florida based on his Civil War experience until he was in his 70s because he felt it was his responsibility to provide for his family, Goodspeed said. The process was slow because it was difficult to find witnesses to his brief period of service so long ago.
The official paperwork approved in 1929 required Lindsey to swear he “did not desert nor take the oath of allegiance to the United States before the close of war.”
Lindsey died at the age of 87 in December 1932. The original stipend of $40 per month was important to Minnie, who never remarried and raised her family on Lindsey’s farm. As time passed and the number of survivors decreased, the monthly allocation increased.
In Book 3 of his Narrative, Shelby Foote mentions that Lee’s lines around Petersburg were stretched so thin, he couldn’t even allow his Jewish soldiers time out of the trenches for Yom Kippur. I was amazed to think of Jewish soldiers, and even more amazed when I read about this website, which is commemorating the contributions of Chinese soldiers to the Civil War.
The silk and porcelain (china) trade brought Westerners in contact with the Chinese. Canton (Kwangchow), of Kwangtung province, became the center of foreign trade, in 1760. England led the western powers in “opening” China to trade. The Treaty of Nanking, after the Opium War (1839-42) opened five ports for commerce. Hong Kong (fragrant harbor) was ceded to the British. Extraterritorial laws were enforced. An indemnity of 21 million silver dollars was imposed. Taxes soared. Local cottage industry could not compete with imported manufactured goods. The result was disastrous to local economy. Furthermore, the Treaty of Tienjin added more indemnity and land Kowloon (nine dragons) to the English. The British and French occupied Canton between 1856 to 1860 and their presence made it easier to recruit peasant boys abroad as cheap labor. Christian missionaries engaged in preaching the gospels enthusiastically. It was under these circumstances that some missionaries and some sea captains “adopted” some small Chinese boys and raised them in North America. This was how the Chinese, boys Joseph Pierce, Antonio Dardelle, Edward Day Cohota and Hong Neok Woo ended up staying in America and served in the Civil War.
Association to commemorate the Chinese serving in the American Civil War.
A Florida columnist has been writing articles drawn from an ancestor’s Civil War diaries. The pieces are too overdramatic for my tastes – shuddering to learn his horse had taken part in Sherman’s March, for instance – but if the details below are to be believed, Charlie Tinker was charged with the disposal of some very unusual items.
“At 12 p.m.,” Charlie recorded, “all was ready and at a special signal from the officer in command, the props were removed and the drops fell, launching all four into eternity with hardly a struggle. The closing scene was horrible, but it was an end of justice fully warranted. I was anxious to see this execution and am satisfied. I never want to witness another.”
It was perhaps Charlie’s obvious seriousness and complete devotion to Lincoln that brought to the 28-year-old an unexpected assignment. For reasons he doesn’t detail, and quite probably didn’t know, Charlie was given the nooses that strangled the co-conspirators and asked to dispose of them.
Imagine that? Perhaps no one in history has ever asked: What happened to the death-rending nooses? Yet, now we know. Charlie Tinker, in his matter-of-fact manner took them home, chopped them into tiny pieces and burned them for kindling in his fireplace.
via Dixie Divas: Charlie Tinker witnessed the execution of Lincolns assassins.
I’d often heard the term “brevet”, but hadn’t thought much about what that entailed. This is an interesting little note.
During the American Civil War, almost all senior officers received some form of brevet award, mainly during the final months of the war. These awards were made for gallantry or meritorious service, not for command. In addition to the authorization in a previous law for awards of brevet ranks to Regular Army officers, an act of Congress of March 3, 1863 authorized the award of brevet rank to officers of the United States Volunteers . Thus, brevet awards became increasingly common later in the war. Some officers even received more than one award. Because of the existence of both Regular Army and United States Volunteers ranks and the possibility that an officer could hold actual and brevet ranks in both services, some general and other officers could hold as many as four different ranks simultaneously. For example, by the end of the war, Ranald S. Mackenzie was a brevet major general of volunteers, an actual, full rank brigadier general of volunteers, a brevet brigadier general in the United States Regular Army, and an actual Regular Army captain.
I wrote a while back about Milton Bradley, and here’s another neat Civil War connection to modern day mundanity: If Edmund McIlhenny hadn’t been bankrupted by the war, there would be no Tabasco sauce.
The South’s economic collapse after its defeat ruined McIlhenny, who now lived with his in-laws in their plantation home on Avery Island, Louisiana. It was there that McIlhenny tended the family garden, where, according to tradition, he grew a variety of fruits and vegetables, including tabasco peppers.
Between 1866 and 1868, McIlhenny — probably inspired by an earlier sauce introduced by New Orleans-area entrepreneur Maunsel White[citation needed] — experimented with making a sauce from the peppers in the Avery family garden. In 1868 he grew his first commercial pepper crop, and the next year sold the first bottles of his new product, which he called Tabasco brand pepper sauce.