As per yesterday’s post, here is the full archive of Charles Leale’s report on the Lincoln assassination.
(I was going to emphasize “handwritten report” until I remembered that the only contemporary alternative was telegraphic code.)
You’d think all the Lincoln documents would’ve been unearthed, after 150 years of access, but you’d be wrong, thankfully.
The latest news is Charles Leale’s official report on the assassination. Leale’s experiences are already well-documented – Sarah Vowell quotes extensively from a letter to his mother in the days following – but new documents are new documents, and I’ll happily take them. (Can you tell I was a history student? So jealous of these stack-diggers who uncover the gems!)
A doctor’s account of his frantic efforts to save the life of President Abraham Lincoln has been rediscovered in the United States, after being lost to history for 150 years.
It was found by chance among hundreds of boxes of old medical reports in the National Archives.
On April 14, 1865, Dr Charles Leale happened to be in the same Washington theatre as the US President, watching the play My American Cousin, when he heard a gunshot and saw a man leap onto the stage.
Leale, 23, who had only received his medical degree six weeks earlier, then became the first person to tend to Lincoln’s wounds and documented the tragic encounter in a 21-page handwritten report.
via A doctor’s bid to save dying Lincoln – timesofmalta.com.
I’m not sure if this is a misguided attempt to appeal to African-American voters or just the usual GOP cluelessness, but the Connecticut Republican Party has spent far too much time lately on a resolution to rescind an historical resolution. As if that wasn’t controversial enough, the resolution in question involves John Brown; a polarizing figure at the time, but one who is now seen as being on the wrong side of insane. As are the idiots who are spending an election year wasting time on this “issue” instead of bringing forth, say, actual legislation that could be helping people living (and – ahem – voting) in the present day.
Party members developed a resolution to rescind the 1860 Republican Party’s “unqualified censure and condemnation” of Brown. But the resolution divided party members.
Members of the state Republican Party Central Committee stumbled upon the 1860 convention’s resolution and hoped today’s GOP leaders would step up and remove the self-described “bruise on the party.”
But the 2012 resolution never made it out of the committee, frustrating some Republicans.
“This is a slap in the face for the town of Torrington,” Republican state committee member Doug Hageman said Thursday. “Their delegates should bring it in and fix this. We’ve got to get rid of this thing.”
The world’s economy is going to bits and this is what these guys consider actionable. Unbelievable. I don’t live in Connecticut, and would never vote Republican, but this makes me want to move just so I can actively vote against them.
Some idiot “historian” has been making waves on the Internet this week, claiming he uncovered a patent Lincoln made for a paper version of Facebook. Naturally, I clicked with interest, but knew at first sight it was a hoax. No pictures were printable in 1843, and the reference to Lincoln “sons” when only Robert was born by that point.
The whole Springfield Gazette was one sheet of paper, and it was all about Lincoln. Only him. Other people only came into the document in conjunction with how he experienced life at that moment. If you look at the Gazette picture above, you can see his portrait in the upper left-hand corner. See how the column of text under him is cut off on the left side? Stupid scanned picture, I know, ugh. But just to the left of his picture, and above that column of text, is a little box. And in that box you see three things: his name, his address, and his profession attorney.
The first column underneath his picture contains a bunch of short blurbs about what’s going on in his life at the moment – work he recently did, some books the family bought, and the new games his boys made up. In the next three columns he shares a quote he likes, two poems, and a short story about the Pilgrim Fathers. I don’t know where he got them, but they’re obviously copied from somewhere. In the last three columns he tells the story of his day at the circus and tiny little story about his current life on the prairie.
Some of the comments compare this kind of hoax to Lincoln’s “tall tales” (apparently mistaking Lincoln for Mark Twain), but the difference is, Lincoln’s jokes were actually funny.
The University of Richmond has posted an interactive, online map that charts the activity of the Union army and (sometimes unrelated) slavery/emancipation events across the states from ’61 to ’65. It’s interesting to note how the red dots (emancipations) generally precede the blue dots (army investments), and to observe the profusion of red and blue dots that signal Sherman’s marches.
The map plots more than 3,000 emancipation-related events from 1861-1865 in 10 categories that range from government actions to abuse of African-Americans. An additional 50,000 entries show Union troop locations during the Civil War, making it easy to see the impact of opportunity on an animated timeline of the war years.
“It tells us that the end of slavery was this really complicated process that happened all over the South, but more in some places than others during the war,” said Scott Nesbit, associate director of the lab.
“The chance for freedom came about on water and on rails. That’s where the Union troops were. But at some places in the South, people remained enslaved the entire war, long after the Emancipation Proclamation.
“And, just because you get to Union lines doesn’t mean you’re going to start having a good time. These first years of freedom, if we can even call it that, were filled with coercion and danger. … (In the contraband camps,) African-Americans were treated as essentially free, as free as someone can be who is impressed into service by the military and not allowed to leave.”
via UR effort maps the end of slavery | Richmond Times-Dispatch.
As if the Lincoln Library needs more adversity in this troubled sesquicentennial, it seems one of their centerpieces is of questionable provenance. Such a sham(e).
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield has long proclaimed that an 1850s-era stovepipe hat in the museum’s possession belonged to Lincoln.
But this month, after Dave McKinney of the Chicago Sun-Times began looking into the matter, museum officials admitted they can’t prove it.
via Editorial: The mystery of Lincoln’s hat – Chicago Sun-Times.
I ragged on the trip planner from the National Parks Service Civil War website, but the rest of the site is fantastic. I’ve always found the NPS site-sites lacking in information. If you want two paragraphs on why they’re important, OK, but God forbid they should have photos of what to see while you’re there. The new sites have more information, and more photos – both new and wartime. The NPS is worth a visit, whether virtual or “meatspace”.
The US Postal Service has created some 1862 sesquicentennial stamps. They aren’t much more visually interesting than the aforementioned coins, though I admit, I haven’t seen the size of the stamps. Super-huge stamps would give a bit more oomph than the watercolored drabness of the Antietam scene, and the New Orleans battle is a bit hard to make out on a small scale.
The Civil War: 1862 (Forever) – The Postal Store @ USPS.com.
After 150 years, historians are taking a second look at the estimated death count of the war. A new thesis, based upon census data, suggests a significant boost in the numbers.
The true death toll was probably about 750,000 – 20 percent higher than the traditionally quoted figure of 620,000 – and might have been as high as 850,000, according to J. David Hacker of New York’s Binghamton University…
Hacker’s conclusions, published in the December issue of the journal Civil War History, are “already gaining acceptance from scholars,” the New York Times reported today.
The journal called the article “among the most consequential pieces” it has ever published, and Columbia historian Eric Foner told the Times the study “further elevates the significance of the Civil War” and “helps you understand, particularly in the South with a much smaller population, what a devastating experience this was.”
NPR puts a name to an unknown soldier. This is a fascinating piece of modern detective work.
Now that we had the regiment, the next step was to visit the New York soldiers index, where a search in the National Parks Service Soldier and Sailors Database turned up four possibilities with the right initials: Thomas Abbott, Thomas Adams, Thomas Ardies and Thomas Austin.
Our next stop was visiting Vonnie Zullo, a professional researcher who does a great deal of her work at the National Archives in Washington.
At the Archives, we pull the pension files and military service records of our four soldiers — all with the first name “Thomas,” and the last initial “A.” Very quickly, Zullo rules out two of the possible candidates: Adams and Austin.
“One never actually reported to his unit,” she says. “And the other soldier was in a band — and he was 35 years old and much larger.”
And then there were two…