Tag Archives: states

Mardi Gras Floats

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It seems 10 years of Union occupation didn’t diminish New Orleans’ loathing of Ben Butler.  This neat Mardi Gras float design shows they’d moved on from chamber pots to other forms of effigy.  Note the eponymous Spoons!

In 1873, Mardi Gras revelers from the Mistick Krewe of Comus — unversed in this newfangled evolutionary theory and angry at the Northern interlopers — dressed up as the “missing links” between animals, plants, and humans. Therefore, you had frightening human-grape and human-corn hybrids running around and fauna baring the faces of Ulysses S. Grant, other hated politicians, and Darwin himself.

via Bizarre Mardi Gras floats of yesteryear – Boing Boing.

Gov. William Buckingham

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I’m familiar with a few Civil War state governors, but William A. Buckingham’s name was new to me.  Funny how venerable men can fade from history as the years pass.

The story goes that President Abraham Lincoln was at work in the White House executive office one day when he was interrupted by a visitor from Connecticut.

Rising from his chair, the lanky, care-worn president clamped his hand down on the man’s shoulder and exclaimed: “From Connecticut? Do you know what a good governor you have got?”

Lincoln knew well what Connecticut today has largely forgotten: Its Civil War governor, William Alfred Buckingham, was one of the greatest leaders in the state’s long history.

One of only four Union governors to serve throughout the entire Civil War, Buckingham proved an able, energetic administrator, a staunch and often eloquent opponent of slavery and a vital supporter of the Lincoln administration. His decisiveness and political courage in the days immediately following Fort Sumter assured that Connecticut was among the first states to answer Lincoln’s call for volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion.

When the crisis refused to die quickly, Buckingham’s administration worked tirelessly over the next four years to raise and supply troops…

For years afterward, Buckingham Day observances were held. But today, Buckingham’s legacy has been largely forgotten.

via Gov. William Buckingham: Gov. William Buckingham, Faded From History, Played National Role During Civil War – Hartford Courant.

Non-Sequitur Statues

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One of the many Civil War commemorations around Washington, DC, are a series of statues to the heroes of the war: Grant, Sherman, Farragut, McPherson and… Albert Pike?

Who the heck is Albert Pike? In all my years of study, I’ve never found a reason to remember that name.  A quick glance at his Wikipedia page shows us he was a pro-slavery former Know-Nothing who became a Confederate brigadier (not even a major) general, and whose wartime service was so spotty he resigned even before the war got started.

That takes care of the who, but doesn’t cover the why; Why would such a now-forgotten military figure receive such a huge honour?  Masonic influence must go a long way.  There’s no other reason I can cite for this otherwise forgettable Confederate occupying a pedestal in a city where pedestals are highly contested territory.

Albert Pike (December 29, 1809–April 2, 1891) was an attorney, Confederate officer, writer, and Freemason. Pike is the only Confederate military officer or figure to be honored with an outdoor statue in Washington, D.C.

via Albert Pike – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Lincoln Giveth, and Lincoln Taketh Away

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If you’re an American reading this, your income taxes are due today.  Lincoln, of course, famously instituted the income tax into law, but did you know that your two day “tax holiday” this year is due to Abe as well?  Turns out DC shuts down for Emancipation Day, which commemorates an event most of us have long forgotten: The purchased emancipation of DC’s slaves, in 1862.  Harold Holzer wrote this nifty little summary, and it’s worth a read. (Assuming, of course, you haven’t got taxes to finish… or start?)

So the future “Great Emancipator” kept the D.C. freedom bill on his desk, unsigned, for two long days – delaying, he confided, until one Kentucky congressman could spirit his own aged servants back to his home state, where slavery remained lawful. This very newspaper reported “turbulence and disorder” throughout Washington, with “slave-hunters chasing up their dark-skinned chattels, to remove them, into Maryland and Virginia” before emancipation could be approved…

Yet the mere fact that a Congress and a president had worked together to end generations of pro-slavery tradition somewhere resonated with breathtaking power in April 1862. No doubt the excitement owed much to the venue: the national capital. It did not seem to matter that only 3,000 were liberated in Washington while millions remained in chains nationwide. As Frederick Douglass predicted: “Kill slavery at the heart of the nation, and it will certainly die at the extremities. This looks small, but it is not so. It is a giant stride toward the grand result.”

Tax holiday inspired by freedom – Philly.com.

St Louis in Wartime

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I’d procrastinated on reading this article, mainly due to its length, but it’s a fascinating read and entertainingly written – well worth the investment in time. While it eventually settles down into an examination of the German immigrant population and its effect on the border state, it’s introduced by a look at the city that Sherman and Grant called home, and by this rather fabulous summary:

The leading city in one of the nation’s most populous slaveholding states, St. Louis was a strategic prize like no other. Not only the largest settlement beyond the Appalachians, it was also the country’s second-largest port, commanding the Mississippi River as well as the Missouri, which was then navigable as far upstream as what is now the state of Montana. It was the eastern gateway to the overland trails to California. Last but far from least, the city was home to the St. Louis Arsenal, the biggest cache of federal arms in the slave states, a central munitions depot for Army posts between New Orleans and the Rockies. Whoever held St. Louis held the key to the Mississippi Valley and perhaps even to the whole American West.

The city and its surrounding state stood at a crossroads between the cultures of the North and the South, between slavery and freedom, between an older America and a new one. The old Missouri flourished in the region known as Little Dixie, the rich alluvial lands where black field hands toiled in the hemp and cotton fields. The new one could be found in St. Louis, where block after block of red-brick monotony— warehouses, manufacturing plants, and office buildings—stretched for miles along the bluffs above the river. Each year, more than 4,000 steamboats shouldered up to the wharves, vessels with names like War Eagle, Champion, Belle of Memphis, and Big St. Louis. The smoke from their coal-fired furnaces mingled with the thick black clouds belching from factory smokestacks, so that on windless days the sun shone feebly through a dark canopy overhead.

(Hands up if you knew that “second largest port” fact. My hand is decidedly lowered!)

Referential Trifecta

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Here’s a post that brings together three recent references made on this blog: Civil War hospitals, Washington DC in the war, and Walt Whitman.

Yet Whitman made a much different mark on our country during the Civil War, as a nurse’s aide and hospice caregiver. His kindnesses touched hundreds of injured, wounded and dying soldiers in army hospitals in Virginia and the District of Columbia after the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.

My great-great grand-uncle, Ephraim Miner, of Somerset County, was one soldier whose path crossed Whitman’s. He kept wartime diaries — likely in notebooks provided by Whitman himself — and I published them last year. While my uncle does not write about the poet, the overlap of their experiences suggests they knew each other briefly, and that this resulted in a rich written Civil War legacy from an otherwise very private farmboy.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/12036/1207984-109.stm

Civil War Washington

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After posting the entry about the Whitman Archive, I received a note from Archive employee Bev Rilett.

Thanks for the kind notice of the Whitman Archive. I work there for Ken Price, who has been supporting grad students in English with this monumental project for more than 10 years. Try our bibliography search feature for any Whitman-related topic you can think of! You might also be interested in our newer related project, Civil War Washington, available here: http://civilwardc.org/

All this work is supported through the University of Nebraska and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other government funding for public education.

I’ve had a look at the Civil War Washington site, and it is absolutely worth checking out. Maps, texts, and images galore, emphasising a development that gets overshadowed by the hubbub of the war years: That those four years of struggle changed DC from a kind of rural backwater to the Nation’s-Capital-note-caps seat of power. I’m not enough of a historian to know when the “Presidential power” tradition began, but it’d be interesting mapping that trend on a chart along with this!

http://civilwardc.org/

Connecticut Resistance

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I am guilty of forgetting that the Union was not a big swath of blue: There were a number of dissenters to the war not named Greeley or Vallandigham. Turns out, a great many of them lived in Connecticut.

…when people think of the Civil War, very few people think of Connecticut right away. When people think of history and Connecticut they usually think of America’s Revolution and the Colonial Period.

“But Connecticut actually has a very deep Civil War history,” Mr. Warshauer said, and it wasn’t completely pro-Union or completely Abolitionist in sentiment.

“There was a lot of disagreement in Connecticut over the question of Southern secession,” he said. “We were not primarily an Abolitionist state. In fact, we were probably the most anti-Abolitionist state of all the New England states.”

http://www.acorn-online.com/joomla15/wiltonbulletin/news/localnews/113206-connecticuts-role-in-the-civil-war-history-holds-some-surprises.html

South Carolina History

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This little piece on the resurrected Hunley caught my eye for two very different reasons. The first was this:

The reason the Hunley sank is still a mystery. Eight sailors were aboard and their bodies discovered still at their stations 136 years after their final mission. McConnell is one of a select few who’ve sat inside the Hunley.

“It’s like having your head in Darth Vader’s mask,” he said. “You can hear your breathing and the echoing of everything around your head.”

I’m amazed that the preservationists would allow anyone – even a history-loving State Senator – to climb in. The shell is so fragile and rusted, you’d think it would be too risky.

The other was the lede:

As South Carolina Republicans were making history at their primary Saturday…

South Carolina: Still proudly “making history” through questionable electoral decisions!

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57363382/restoring-a-piece-of-s.c.s-civil-war-history/