Thanksgiving is just a day away, and I’ve been noticing on Facebook, friends posting what they are thankful for this holiday season. Those statuses certainly have given me pause to count my own blessings. First and foremost, I am thankful for my family, who, no matter how far away I am from them, help me …
With the November opening of the new exhibition “The Civil War in America” only a month away, media outlets picked up on the announcement of a new blog featuring historical voices from the war. The Associated Press wrote an announcement that many outlets ran with, including The Washington Post, WTOP, military.com and various broadcast affiliates …
While the Civil War imposed hardships on both sides, the South found it particularly difficult to adapt to new realities of daily life. The blockade of Southern seaports and the prohibition of trade with the North quickly depleted food supplies throughout the Confederacy. Farmers became soldiers, and a large percentage of crops were used to …
According to the 1860 census, the population of the United States that year was 31,429,891. Of that number, 3,952, 838 were reported as enslaved. The 1860 census was the last time the federal government took a count of the Southern slave population. In 1861, the United States Coast Survey issued two maps of slavery based …
LeRoy Gresham (1847-1865) was a teenaged invalid who kept a diary for nearly every day of the Civil War, recording the news, his Confederate sympathies and perceptive details about life on the homefront as he experienced the conflict through newspapers, letters and personal visitors. The son of an attorney, judge, and plantation owner in Macon, …
“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive …
For some Union soldiers, their exposure to southern slavery profoundly altered their views on the institution, even before President Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. One such soldier, John P. Jones, wrote to his wife of his increasing sympathy for abolitionism after seeing the inhumanity with which slaves could be treated. He …
Fatalities during the Civil War were not limited to the battlefield, as both first families discovered. Both the Lincolns and the Davises lost young sons within a couple of years from each other. The Davises lost 5-year-old Joseph in 1864 when he fell to his death from their porch in Richmond, Va. According to one …
“Better, sir, far better, that the blood of every man, woman, and child within the limits of the state should flow, than that she should defy the federal government,” swore Union Gen. Nathaniel Lyon to Missouri governor and Confederate sympathizer Claiborne Fox Jackson during negotiations to prevent the state from joining the Confederacy. His next …