Confederate Army Quotes

For the life of me, I did not understand how he[Atticus] could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic.

Now I am not ordering you to go. If you are successful, you will strike a blow to the confederacy. If you are caught, you will be hanged. If not killed outright. Do you still want to go?" "Yes sir".

If they were determined to steal his train, he was equally determined to get it back

Let us catch those vile fiends, however since we cannot go forward, we will pursue them in reverse.

On Lee as commander: "He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor.

The locomotive appeared as a mammoth apparition that came bearing down on them and seemed to stop just a few feet away.

Sir" said Mrs. Meade indignantly. "There are NO deserters in the Confederate army." "I beg your pardon," said Rhett with mock humility. "I meant those thousands on furlough who FORGOT to rejoin their regiments and those who have been over their wounds for six months but who remain at home, going about their usual business or doing the spring plowing.

I've been a soldier all my life. I've fought from the ranks on up, you know my service. But sir, I must tell you now, I believe this attack will fail. No 15,000 men ever made could take that ridge. It's a distance of more than a mile, over open ground. When the men come out of the trees, they will be under fire from Yankee artillery from all over the field. And those are Hancock's boys! And now, they have the stone wall like we did at Fredericksburg. - Lieutenant General James Longstreet to General Robert E. Lee after the initial Confederate victories on day one of the Battle of Gettysburg.

It is not simply that statues of Lee and other Confederates stand as monuments to a traitorous army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery; it is also that we, US taxpayers, are paying for their maintenance and preservation.

The Southern sense of honor in place is also seen in Robert E. Lee; he opposed Southern secession, even made some ambiguous statements that could be viewed as opposed to slavery. Yet when offered the command of the Union Army by Lincoln, Lee wrote, “I wish to live under no other government and there is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union save that of honor.” When Virginia chose secession, he regretfully fulfilled his sense of honor to his home and led the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

Both men lost speech in their last days and hours. Both died at age sixty-three, Lee long since weary of life, and Grant ready to live it again. Their war made them national icons, and their war reputations dictated the balance of their lives, careers, and posterity.

I did not understand how he could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic.

The Confederate Army’s fight against overwhelming odds, is one of the most glorious moments in Anglo-Saxon history.” —Sir Winston Churchill

Worse, Lee felt isolated. In Texas he skipped meals with others to avoid “uninteresting men,” wishing he was back by his campfire on the plains eating his meals alone.211 He avoided sharing quarters and found that he “would infinitely prefer my tent to my-self.”212 In a group he felt more alone than out on the prairie, and that “my pleasure is derived from my own thoughts.

For the life of me, I did not understand how he could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic.

Bella Swan: Jasper? Are you sure there's nothing I can do to help? Jasper Hale: Well just your presence alone, your scent, will distract the newborns. Their hunting instinct will take over, and drive 'em crazy. Bella Swan: Good, I'm glad. [Jasper nods and begins to walk away] Bella Swan: . Bella Swan: Hey, [Jasper turns around] Bella Swan: how do you know so much about this? Jasper Hale: I didn't have quite the same upbringing as my adopted siblings. [Rolls up sleeves and shows Bella his arms, which have bite marks on them] Jasper Hale: . Bella Swan: [Hops off Jeep] Those bites are like mine. Jasper Hale: Battle scars [smiles] Jasper Hale: . All the training the Confederate Army gave me was useless against the newborns, but still, I never lost a fight. Bella Swan: Hey, this - this happened during the Civil War? Jasper Hale: I was the youngest major in the Texas Calvary, all without having seen any real battle. Bella Swan: Until...? Jasper Hale: Till I met a certain immortal... Maria

Notwithstanding our boastful assertions to the world, for nearly a century, that our government was based on the consent of the people, it rests upon force, as much as any government that ever existed. - Robert E. Lee

He had bludgeoned the Southern will to resist the military strength of the United States. He had destroyed any realistic hope of ultimate Confederate success, and the people of the South realized that the Confederate armies could not protect them. The

IV. THE GENERAL STRIKE How the Civil War meant emancipation and how the black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.

An estimated 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. Many were like Amy Clarke, who enlisted so she could remain with her husband when he joined the Confederate Army. Amy continued to fight after he was killed, and she was wounded herself and taken prisoner.

Every one I talk to is in favor of putting negroes in the army and that immediately … I think slavery is now gone and what little there is left of it should be rendered as serviceable as possible.” For her part, Mary Chesnut lamented, “If we had only freed the negroes at first and put them in the army—that would have trumped [the Union’s] trick.

This was crazy. Celeste had merely said her relatives would love to have her stay with them, they had plenty of room. She hadn’t said that they could have housed a large portion of the Confederate army. Well, she’d stay one night and if things didn’t work out, she’d seen an inn in the little town they’d just driven through. It at least had a coat of paint.

After the war, Fitz Lee served as governor of Virginia and became one of several former Confederate commanders to return to duty in the U.S. Army for the Spanish-American War.

Jem,” he said, “are you responsible for this?” “Yes sir.” “Why’d you do it?” Jem said softly, “She said you lawed for niggers and trash.” “You did this because she said that?” Jem’s lips moved, but his, “Yes sir,” was inaudible. “Son, I have no doubt that you’ve been annoyed by your contemporaries about me lawing for niggers, as you say, but to do something like this to a sick old lady is inexcusable. I strongly advise you to go down and have a talk with Mrs. Dubose,” said Atticus. “Come straight home afterward.” Jem did not move. “Go on, I said.” I followed Jem out of the livingroom. “Come back here,” Atticus said to me. I came back. Atticus picked up the Mobile Press and sat down in the rocking chair Jem had vacated. For the life of me, I did not understand how he could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic. Of course Jem antagonized me sometimes until I could kill him, but when it came down to it he was all I had. Atticus did not seem to realize this, or if he did he didn’t care. I hated him for that, but when you are in trouble you become easily tired: soon I was hiding in his lap and his arms were around me. “You’re mighty big to be rocked,” he said. “You don’t care what happens to him,” I said. “You just send him on to get shot at when all he was doin‘ was standin’ up for you.” Atticus pushed my head under his chin. “It’s not time to worry yet,” he said.

The copperhead disreputable portion of the press magnified rebel successes, and belittled those of the Union army. It was, with a large following, an auxiliary to the Confederate army. The North would have been much stronger with a hundred thousand of these men in the Confederate ranks and the rest of their kind thoroughly subdued, as the Union sentiment was in the South, than we were as the battle was fought.

The consequence of this reality was that in virtually every major battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give theirs up.

Grant was forty-two and Lee fifty-seven, Grant at the peak of health and energy, while Lee feared his weakening body and lagging faculties. Each was defending his notion of home. Grant by now was the most popular man in the Union, arguably more so even than Lincoln. Lee was easily the most important man in the Confederacy, his popularity and influence, had he chosen to use it, far outstripping Davis’s. Unquestionably, they were at this moment the preeminent military figures in America, and arguably the world.

Sherman making a mockery of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s recent assertion, while visiting the Rebel army, that the Yankees would have to retreat from Georgia or starve, and predicting that the retreat would be “more disastrous than was that of Napoleon from Moscow.

His decision to break off, however, left the critical ground between South Mountain and Hagerstown firmly in Confederate hands, meaning that Lee’s army would be able to concentrate there. In this, Kilpatrick inexplicably cost the Army of the Potomac the initiative that it never could regain.

It was from Granny's conversations, year after year, that the meager details of Grandpa's life came to me. When the Civil War broke out, he ran off from his master and groped his way through the Confederate lines to the North. He darkly boasted of having killed "mo'n mah fair share of those damn rebels" while en route to enlist in the Union Army. Militantly resentful of slavery, he joined the Union Army... Mustered out, he returned to the South and, during elections, guarded ballot boxes with his army rifle so that Negroes could vote. But when the Negro had been driven from political power, his spirit had been crushed. He was convinced that the war had not really ended, that it would start again.

In Berlin, Stauffenberg and his confederates had at last perfected their plans. They were lumped under the code name “Valkyrie”—an appropriate term, since the Valkyrie were the maidens in Norse-German mythology, beautiful but terrifying, who were supposed to have hovered over the ancient battlefields choosing those who would be slain. In this case, Adolf Hitler was to be slain. Ironically enough, Admiral Canaris, before his fall, had sold the Fuehrer the idea of Valkyrie, dressing it up as a plan for the Home Army to take over the security of Berlin and the other large cities in case of a revolt of the millions of foreign laborers toiling in these centers. Such a revolt was highly unlikely—indeed, impossible—since the foreign workers were unarmed and unorganized, but to the suspicious Fuehrer danger lurked everywhere these days, and, with almost all the able-bodied soldiers absent from the homeland either at the front or keeping down the populace in the far-flung occupied areas, he readily fell in with the idea that the Home Army ought to have plans for protecting the internal security of the Reich against the hordes of sullen slave laborers.

Civil War armies were the most literate in history to that time. More than 90 percent of white Union soldiers and more than 80 percent of Confederate soldiers were literate, and most of them wrote frequent letters to families and friends... I am convinced that [their letters and diaries] bring us closer to the real thoughts and emotions of those men than any other kind of surviving evidence.

failed to mention that the land upon which Angola is built had once been the plantation of Isaac Franklin, a man whose business, Franklin and Armfield, became one of the largest slave-trading firms in the United States. The plantation produced 3,100 bales of cotton a year, a yield higher than most other plantations in the South. He failed to mention that Samuel Lawrence James, who purchased the plantation from Franklin’s widow, was a former major in the Confederate Army. James agreed to a twenty-one-year lease with the state to purchase access to all of the state’s prisoners as long as he was able to keep all of the profits. James subsequently subcontracted the prisoners to labor camps, where—as Roger had told us—they worked on levees and railroads in horrific conditions. A prisoner under James’s lease had a greater chance of dying than an enslaved person did.

I thought myself better adapted to command in the field; and Mississippi had given me the position which I preferred to any other—the highest rank in her army. It was, therefore, that I afterward said, in an address delivered in the Capitol, before the Legislature of the State, with reference to my election to the Presidency of the Confederacy, that the duty to which I was thus called was temporary, and that I expected soon to be with the Army of Mississippi again.

Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine, who so valiantly defended Little Round Top at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, was in command of the Union troops assembled in formation to observe and accept the stacking of arms. In deference to the officers of Lee’s army, Chamberlain lowered his sword in an officer’s salute as each ranking member of his former enemy passed by. Leading the parade of surrender were the surviving members of the Stonewall Brigade. Appendix

Predictably, northern military units predominated, but the presence of Confederate soldiers touched onlookers. “It was quite a sight to see the Stonewall Brigade [march] up Fifth Avenue with their drums marked Staunton, Va.,” one said. “They wore the grey, with a black and brass helmet. There were several companies of Virginia and Southern troops.”148 Contingents of black veterans were liberally represented among the sixty thousand soldiers, supplemented by eighteen thousand veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Ironically, one concession Davis did make concerned the explosive question of turning slaves into Confederate soldiers. After dismissing as “too controversial” the entreaty by General Patrick Cleburne that slaves be armed and enlisted to fight for the South, Davis finally embraced the notion very late in the game. The Confederate Congress began debating the issue in the early months of 1865, creating a star-burst of vituperation in Richmond. The bombastic old General How-ell Cobb of Georgia roared, “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong!” Davis rebuked him this way: “If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, ‘Died of a Theory.’ ” In the end, less than a month before Lee’s surrender, the Confederate Congress approved a bill providing for the partial emancipation and enlistment of slaves in the Confederate armies. The lawyer in Cleburne might have found the debate interesting had he lived to see it, which he did not. He was slain leading his division during Hood’s charge on Franklin, Tennessee, in November 1864.

Robert E. Lee had done his duty and, however heartbroken, was prepared to do his duty still. Having devoted himself to winning the war, until the bitter end, he was now beginning the transition to an equally fervent commitment, reuniting the two halves of the divided country. As he slowly rode back to his camp, some fifteen minutes away, advance soldiers began to shout, “General, are we surrendered?” Lee struggled for words to express his sense of despair and came up short; he was speechless. But soon, two solid walls of men began to line the road, and when he came into view, they began to cheer wildly. At the sound and the sight, tears started to roll in the general’s eyes, and his men, too, began to weep.

In the morning we shed our blue sheep’s clothing. Our border shirts came out of satchels and onto our backs. We preferred this means of dress for it was more flatout and honest. The shirts were large with pistol pockets, and usually colored red or dun. Many had been embroidered with ornate stitching by loving women some were blessed enough to have. Mine was plain, but well broken in. I can think of no more chilling a sight than that of myself all astride my big bay horse with six or eight pistols dangling from my saddle, my rebel locks aloft on the breeze and a whoopish yell on my lips. When my awful costume was multiplied by that of my comrades, we stopped feint hearts just by our mode of dread stylishness.

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.

Isn't this grand? Here I am, a nobody from a nowhere town in North Carolina, and now I've seen Richmond and Washington City both. Who'd've figured I'd travel so far? Must be close to two hundred miles down to Rivington." Caudell nodded. The army had expanded his life. Before the war, outside of a couple of trips to Raleigh, he'd spent his whole life inside Nash County. Now he'd been in several different states and even though recalling it still came hard sometimes-a for eign country: the United States. Whether in a foreign country or not, Washington was still the source of traditions he held dear, as London once might have been to an early Carolina colonist. ...The ordinary folk of Washington City did better at taking their occupiers in stride. Their principal complaint against the rebels was that they had too little money, and that in Confederate currency. Lee had issued an order that made the locals take Southern money in exchange for goods and services, but he could not

The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won.

The profilers’ plan to coax me out of the woods resembled a comedy skit. During their search of my Cane Creek trailer, the feds had found dozens of books on the Civil War. And interviews with my friends confirmed that I was a bona fide Civil War buff. The profilers looked at all this Civil War “stimuli” and concluded that my hiding in the mountains was a form of role-playing. Starring in my own Civil War fantasy, I was a lone rebel fighting for the Lost Cause, and the task force was a Yankee army out to capture me. To talk On August 16, the task force pulled out of the woods while Bo and his rebels went in. They had to look the part, so the FBI profilers dressed them in white hats with the word “REBEL” stenciled in red letters across the front; and around their neck each rebel wore a Confederate flag bandanna.me into surrendering, they needed some of my rebel comrades to convince me that the war was over and it was time to lay down my arms. Colonel Gritz and his crew were assigned the role of my rebel comrades. They were there to “rescue” me from the Yankee horde. Bo’s band of rebels pitched camp down in Tusquitee, north of the town of Hayesville. Beginning at Bob Allison Campground – the place where I’d abandoned Nordmann’s truck – they worked their way west into the Tusquitee Mountains. They walked the trails, blowing whistles and yelling “Eric, we’re here with Bo Gritz to save you.” They searched for a week. I lost it when I heard on the radio that the profilers had dressed Gritz’s clowns in “REBEL” hats and Confederate flag bandannas. I laughed so hard I think I broke a rib.

Longstreet reached Catoosa Station the following afternoon, September 19, but found no guide waiting to take him to Bragg or give him news of the battle he could hear raging beyond the western screen of woods. When the horses came up on a later train, he had three of them saddled and set out with two members of his staff to find the headquarters of the Army of Tennessee. He was helped in this, so far as the general direction was concerned, by the rearward drift of the wounded, although none of these unfortunates seemed to know exactly where he could find their commander. Night fell and the three officers continued their ride by moonlight until they were halted by a challenge out of the darkness just ahead: “Who comes there?” “Friends,” they replied, promptly but with circumspection, and in the course of the parley that followed they asked the sentry to identify his unit. When he did so by giving the numbers of his brigade and division—Confederate outfits were invariably known by the names of their commanders—they knew they had blundered into the Union lines. “Let us ride down a little way to find a better crossing,” Old Peter said, disguising his southern accent, and the still-mounted trio withdrew, unfired on, to continue their search for Bragg. It was barely an hour before midnight when they found him—or, rather, found his camp; for he was asleep in his ambulance by then. He turned out for a brief conference, in the course of which he outlined, rather sketchily, what had happened up to now in his contest with Rosecrans, now approaching a climax here at Chickamauga, and passed on the orders already issued to the five corps commanders for a dawn attack next morning. Longstreet, though he had never seen the field by daylight, was informed that he would have charge of the left wing, which contained six of the army’s eleven divisions, including his own two fragmentary ones that had arrived today and yesterday from Virginia. For whatever it might be worth, Bragg also gave him what he later described as “a map showing prominent topographical features of the ground from the Chickamauga River to Mission Ridge, and beyond to the Lookout Mountain range.” Otherwise he was on his own, so far as information was concerned.

Arthur was tired out. He had been broken by the two battles which he had fought already, the one at Dover, the other at Barbara Down. His wife was a prisoner. His oldest friend was banished. His son was trying to kill him. Gawaine was buried. His Table was dispersed. His country was at war. Yet he could have breasted all these things in some way, if the central tenet of his heart had not been ravaged. Long ago, when his mind had been a nimble boy's called Wart—long ago he had been taught by an aged benevolence, wagging a white beard. He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin. He had been forged as a weapon for the aid of man, on the assumption that men were good. He had been forged, by that deluded old teacher, into a sort of Pasteur or Curie or patient discoverer of insulin. The service for which he had been destined had been against Force, the mental illness of humanity. His Table, his idea of Chivalry, his Holy Grail, his devotion to Justice: these had been progressive steps in the effort for which he had been bred He was like a scientist who had pursued the root of cancer all his life. Might—to have ended it— to have made men happier. But the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent. Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again. It was the flood of Force Majeur. During the earliest days before his marriage he had tried to match its strength with strength—in his battles against the Gaelic confederation—only to find that two wrongs did not make a right. But he had crushed the feudal dream of war successfully. Then, with his Round Table, he had tried to harness Tyranny in lesser forms, so that its power might be used for useful ends. He had sent out the men of might to rescue the oppressed and to straighten evil —to put down the individual might of barons, just as he had put down the might of kings. They had done so—until, in the course of time, the ends had been achieved, but the force had remained upon his hands unchastened. So he had sought for a new channel, had sent them out on God's business, searching for the Holy Grail. That too had been a failure, because those who had achieved the Quest had become perfect and been lost to the world, while those who had failed in it had soon returned no better. At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape—in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.

So Travis must have been one of her informants, except he didn’t know it.” Miranda picked up the probably scenario. “And when he found out, he felt betrayed for himself and the Confederate army.” “And he wouldn’t have had a choice, really.” Gage’s expression was troubled. “He knew he’d have to turn her in. He knew she’d have to be executed…” Nodding at Gage, Ashley lowered her voice. “So he gave Ellena the choice.” “Some choice.” Parker grinned. “Either I kill you, or you kill you.” Despite Parker’s twisted attempt at humor, a heavy silence settled over the group. At last Etienne cleared his throat. “So Travis, I guess he musta loved her, yeah? To give her a way out like that?” “I can’t even imagine.” Ashley fixed Etienne with a sorrowful gaze. “The fear she would have felt…the shame and humiliation--” “But he let her die with some dignity. You gotta give him that.” “And then he burned down the opera house,” Miranda whispered. “He burned down the Rose.” Ashley’s gaze misted over. “Both Roses. He destroyed both Roses.” For a long moment, they all seemed lost in their own thoughts. Then Parker spoke up. “Yeah.” Tilting his chair back, he winked at Gage and Etienne. “That’s the way to a girl’s heart, all right. Give her poison, then burn down her house.” Roo’s stare was openly curious. “Tell us the truth, Parker. Are you really just a changeling in human form?

Butler's actions paved the way for the First Confiscation Act, signed into law on August 6, 1861. The act said that any slave utilized for the Confederate war effort was not protected by the Fugitive Slave Act and could be sheltered inside the Union. Because it was so difficult to prove that an escaped slave was not under Confederate auspices, virtually all escaped slaves were permitted sanctuary within federal forces—though a few Union officers, like army General Henry Halleck, continued to return them to their owners, at least until March 31, 1862, when it became a military crime to return contrabands. Although the runaways were not officially freed until Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Butler's legal maneuvering, followed by the First Confiscation Act, helped turn the wheels.9

In the East the opposing forces stood in substantially the same relations towards each other as three years before, or when the war began; they were both between the Federal and Confederate capitals. It is true, footholds had been secured by us on the sea-coast, in Virginia and North Carolina, but, beyond that, no substantial advantage had been gained by either side. Battles had been fought of as great severity as had ever been known in war, over ground from the James River and Chickahominy, near Richmond, to Gettysburg and Chambersburg, in Pennsylvania, with indecisive results, sometimes favorable to the National army, sometimes to the Confederate army; but in every instance, I believe, claimed as victories for the South by the Southern press if not by the Southern generals. The Northern press, as a whole, did not discourage these claims; a portion of it always magnified rebel success and belittled ours, while another portion, most sincerely earnest in their desire for the preservation of the Union and the overwhelming success of the Federal armies, would nevertheless generally express dissatisfaction with whatever victories were gained because they were not more complete.

All former confederate governments presided over communities, but that of the Union rules individuals; its force is not borrowed, but self-derived; and it is served by its own civil and military officers, by its own army, and its own courts of justice.

While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution that again called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. This prescient document encapsulated many features of the 1787 Constitution: a federal government with powers separated among legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and a Congress with the power to levy taxes and raise an army.

Zac was twenty-three when he died. He was a Captain in the Confederate army until he was shot by a Union soldier. Captain Zachary Degaud. That was one hundred and forty seven years ago, in 1865. It was cold comfort that the civil war had ended shortly thereafter. Actually, it was like a punch in the face. Today was his one hundred and seventieth birthday and he sat at the bar, in a dive posing as a respectable restaurant in the small southern town of Ashburton, Louisiana. The hole in the swamp where he was born a puny human being. But, the sun was shining, the liquor flowing and he was undead. Another binge drinking vampire, with an unremarkable story in the midst of the murky swampland of the South. Edward, Louis, Armand, Lestat. If these vampires existed, he hadn't met them. “Happy birthday, brother.” A man slapped him on the shoulder and sat on the neighboring

After the Battle of Winchester, Jackson allowed his men two days of rest and prayer, while his quartermasters tallied the spoils left behind by the Yankees. Although Jackson drove his men hard, he could sense they were at their limit; their failure to pursue Banks’ broken army was proof of it. While he was eager to get on with the fight, he needed men capable of fighting. He

Thus, the day ended in a tactical stalemate, with the Union suffering nearly 12,500 casualties (including over 2,000 dead) and the Confederates suffering over 10,000 casualties (including over 1,500 dead). Nearly 1/4th of the Army of the Potomac had been injured, captured or killed, and the same could be said for nearly 1/3rd of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. It was the deadliest and bloodiest day in American history. On

Civil War generals began the war employing tactics from the Napoleonic Era, which saw Napoleon dominate the European continent and win crushing victories against large armies. However, the weapons available in 1861 were far more accurate than they had been 50 years earlier. In particular, new rifled barrels created common infantry weapons with deadly accuracy of up to 100 yards, at a time when generals were still leading massed infantry charges with fixed bayonets and attempting to march their men close enough to engage in hand-to-hand combat.

After the battle ended and the Union army was in rapid retreat, Beauregard stated sardonically that had Richmond dispatched adequate supplies to the Confederate armies, he would have been able to pursue the Union army all the way to Washington, implying that Davis had short-changed his troops and cost the Confederates an even greater victory. In his official report, which made its way into the newspapers, Beauregard suggested that Davis had prevented the pursuit and destruction of McDowell's army, as well as the potential capture of Washington D.C. itself.  This only added to the animosity Davis already felt toward the celebrity-seeking general, and it would eventually lead to Beauregard being sidelined during the middle of the war.

Gettysburg was the last time Lee’s army would have the chance to be on the offensive during a campaign, as Grant’s Overland Campaign ground both armies down across Virginia. By the early part of that campaign, the Stonewall Brigade would be all but spent as a fighting force. Unlike

Jackson, since the inception of the brigade, stressed the importance of using the bayonet in battle as the majority of the C.S.A. Army had very short-ranged and grossly inaccurate muskets and balls, while the Union Army had the luxury of rifled bullets and gun barrels. Because of this, the defensive army, primarily the Confederates, had to hold fire until the enemy was close enough to be affected by the short-range muskets. This left the defenders in a safer position as the attackers were usually marching across an open field in an attempt to advance on the defenders.

Feeling increasingly at odds with his superiors, in a letter sent from Gaines’ Mills, Virginia dated June 28, 1862, a frustrated McClellan wrote to Secretary of War Stanton, “If I save the army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to any other person in the Washington.  You have done your best to sacrifice this army.”  McClellan’s argument, however, flies in the face of common knowledge that he had become so obsessed with having sufficient supplies that he’d actually moved to Gaines’ Mill to accommodate the massive amount of provisions he’d accumulated.  Ultimately unable to move his cache of supplies as quickly as his men were needed, McClellan eventually ran railroad cars full of food and supplies into the Pamunkey River rather than leave them behind for the Confederates. Despite

Before leaving, Jackson assembled his brigade to bid them this farewell: “Officers and Soldiers of the First Brigade: I am not here to make a speech, but simply to say farewell. I first met you at Harper’s Ferry, in the commencement of this war, and I cannot take leave of you without giving expression to my admiration for your conduct from that day to this, whether on the march, the bivouac, the tented field, or the bloody plains of Manassas, when you gained the well deserved reputation of having decided the fate of that battle. “Throughout the broad extent of country over which you have marched, by your respect for the rights and property of citizens you have shown that you were soldiers, not only to defend, but able and willing to both defend and protect. You have already gained a brilliant and deservedly high reputation throughout the army and the whole Confederacy, and I trust in the future, by your own deeds on the field, and by the assistance of the same kind Providence who has heretofore favored our cause, you will gain more victories, and add additional luster to the reputation you now enjoy. “You have already gained a proud position in the future history of this, our second war of independence. I shall look with great anxiety to your future movements, and I trust that whenever I shall hear of the 1st Brigade on the field of battle it will be of still nobler deeds achieved and a higher reputation won. “In the Army of the Shenandoah you were the First Brigade, in the Army of the Potomac you were the First Brigade, in the 2d Corps of this army you are the First Brigade; you are First Brigade in the affections of your general, and I hope by your future deeds and bearing you will be handed down to posterity as the First Brigade in this, our second war of independence. Farewell!”[21] As it turned out, this moving speech was premature in its deliverance, because just one month later, after witnessing the deplorable troops over who he was to command, Jackson called for his old brigade to reinforce him in the Valley. An

The fact remains that women and children were left vulnerable to sickness and disease, manipulative slaveholders, and even apathetic Union officers during the Civil War. While historians interpreted the enlistment of black soldiers as an illustration of the patriotic commitment of former slaves to take on the Confederate enemy and to dismantle the institution of slavery, this depiction overlooks the disastrous and fatal effects on the women and children left behind.36 The enlistment of black men in the Union army as soldiers and laborers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, for instance, left more than 10,000 women and children without the means to survive.

Still wanting to go to Richmond, the young woman, having just turned 18 years old, convinced a Union officer whom she called “Lieutenant H.” to escort her and her cousin Alice south across enemy lines. They stopped to rest in Winchester, where a Confederate sympathizer approached Boyd with two packages of letters and asked her, “Miss Boyd, will you take these letters and send them through the lines to the Confederate army? This package is of great importance: the other is trifling in comparison. This also, is a very important paper: try to send it carefully and safely to Jackson, or some other responsible Confederate officer. Do you understand?" Boyd agreed and hid the important group of papers in her maid’s clothing, keeping the letters in a basket she herself was carrying. Then, for reasons known only to herself, she wrote "Kindness of Lieutenant H." on the back of the package. She kept the most important note on her person but persuaded the hapless lieutenant to carry a small folded paper,

For reasons that are still unclear, Union troops in camp at Frederick came across a copy of Special Order 191, wrapped up among three cigars. The order contained Lee’s entire marching plans for Maryland, making it clear that the Army of Northern Virginia had been divided into multiple parts, which, if faced by overpowering strength, could be entirely defeated in detail and bagged separately before they could regather into one fighting force. The “Lost Order” quickly made its way to General McClellan, who took several hours to debate whether or not it was intentional misinformation or actually real. McClellan is usually faulted for not acting quickly enough on these orders,

The Union men at Front Royal were the 1st Maryland. Jackson also had a regiment of 1st Maryland (Confederate). Maryland was a border state, and like all border states, it had regiments in both armies. This was the case with the Southern states as well. When the war broke out, loyalists from all across the South formed their own Union regiments. These were often quickly crushed, or had to flee to the North and fight far from their home territories.

With the Confederate army divided and Pope’s army between them, Pope was now positioned to prevent them from linking up by blocking the Thoroughfare Gap. Ultimately he opted not to, later claiming that when he saw smoke from the flames shooting near Manassas, he figured he had Jackson in trouble and could annihilate the Confederates before Longstreet reunited with them. In fact, those flames were coming from his own supplies, after Jackson’s men began torching what they couldn’t carry.

As the Confederates were preparing, a Union army called the Army of Northeastern Virginia (not to be confused with Lee’s legendary Army of Northern Virginia) was being assembled under the command of 42 year old Irvin McDowell, who was promoted to brigadier general in the regular army on May 14, 1861, despite the fact he had never commanded soldiers in battle. McDowell got the spot as a result of politics, thanks to the influence of his friend and mentor Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary.

Jackson, on the other hand, would be reinforced with several regiments, bringing his total force to 18,500. Robert E. Lee wrote to tell him, “Your recent successes have been the cause of the liveliest joy in this army as well as in the country.” He added that the reinforcements were so he could crush the Union armies in the Shenandoah, unaware at this point they were in the process of being recalled. Jackson was to leave the Valley and support the Confederate center above Richmond by cutting Union communications. Jackson

By the end of the war, the Civil War had become a forerunner to the trench warfare of World War I, and if an army was given 24 hours to entrench, their position became practically unassailable. Thus, the Army of the Potomac’s inability to clear Brock Road on May 8 allowed the Confederates to begin the process of digging in, a crucial advantage.

By 1864 Wall Streeters had spies in the Confederate high command and could learn southern battle plans before colonels in the Army of Virginia did.

Quite often, people inaccurately comment about the villains of the South and the heroes of the North. Such statements cause bitter debates. Thus, it is important to recognize the good and the bad from both the Confederate and Union armies. The fact is, the war stripped many men of their inhibitions and their immoral behaviors detrimentally affected all fellow Americans.

Little did the soldiers of the Second Corps know at that time that General Joseph E. Johnston, commander of the formidable Confederate army ahead of them, had been wounded and disabled in the day’s action. Temporarily, Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith had assumed command, but within days a new commander would take over the reins of the butternut and gray legions—none other than Gen. Robert E. Lee.53

In 1974, San Francisco newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose goals included “death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” After being kept in a closet for a while, she came to identify with her new peer group. Before long, she was enthusiastically helping them generate income, at one point brandishing a machine gun during a bank robbery. When left alone, with an opportunity to escape, she didn’t take it. She later described the experience: “I had virtually no free will until I was separated from them for about two weeks. And then it suddenly, you know, slowly began to dawn that they just weren’t there anymore. I could actually think my own thoughts.” Hearst didn’t just accept her captors’ “subjective” beliefs, such as ideology; she bought into their views about how the physical world works. One of her captors “didn’t want me thinking about rescue because he thought that brain waves could be read or that, you know, they’d get a psychic in to find me. And I was even afraid of that.” Hearst’s condition of coerced credulity is called the Stockholm syndrome, after a kidnapping in Sweden. But the term “syndrome” may be misleading in its suggestion of abnormality. Hearst’s response to her circumstances was probably an example of human nature functioning properly; we seem to be “designed” by natural selection to be brainwashed. Some people find this prospect a shocking affront to human autonomy, but they tend not to be evolutionary psychologists. In Darwinian terms, it makes sense that our species could contain genes encouraging blind credulity in at least some situations. If you are surrounded by a small group of people on whom your survival depends, rejecting the beliefs that are most important to them will not help you live long enough to get your genes into the next generation. Confinement with a small group of people may sound so rare that natural selection would have little chance to take account of it, but it is in a sense the natural human condition. Humans evolved in small groups—twenty, forty, sixty people—from which emigration was often not a viable option. Survival depended on social support: sharing food, sticking together during fights, and so on. To alienate your peers by stubbornly contesting their heartfelt beliefs would have lowered your chances of genetic proliferation. Maybe that explains why you don’t have to lock somebody in a closet to get a bit of the Stockholm syndrome. Religious cults just offer aimless teenagers a free bus ride to a free meal, and after the recruits have been surrounded by believers for a few days, they tend to warm up to the beliefs. And there doesn’t have to be some powerful authority figure pushing the beliefs. In one famous social psychology experiment, subjects opined that two lines of manifestly different lengths were the same length, once a few of their “peers” (who were in fact confederates) voiced that opinion.

Lincoln understood the legal and moral complexities of emancipation. He knew that if he included the slave states that remained in the Union, since they had not seceded, the proclamation would reach the proslavery Supreme Court of Roger Taney. Since the Confederate states had seceded from the Union and removed themselves from civil jurisdiction, “the Confederate states were now under the jurisdiction of the president as commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”31 Since under Articles 1 and 3 of the Constitution only Congress, not the Supreme Court, has the power to adjudicate military law, the proclamation as a military order directing the military’s actions in rebellious states was outside of Taney’s jurisdiction. But as a “measure based in military necessity, the Emancipation Proclamation condensed a millennium of moral and legal reasoning into the short text. It contained an entire world of moral considerations between means and ends.

Lt. Col. Arthur Freemantle, a British observer with Lee’s army at Gettysburg, noted that “in the rear of each regiment were from twenty to thirty negro slaves.” The Blacks who accompanied the army were slaves, not the mythical Black soldiers who rallied to the Confederacy, as Lost Cause proponents allege: “Tens of thousands of slaves accompanied their owners to army camps as servants or were impressed into service to construct fortifications and do other work for the Confederate army.

The power of raising armies, by the most obvious construction of the articles of the Confederation, is merely a power of making requisitions upon the States for quotas of men. This practice in the course of the late war, was found replete with obstructions to a vigorous and to an economical system of defense. It gave birth to a competition between the States which created a kind of auction for men.

Of the 52 Confederate generals who had crossed the Potomac in the past three weeks, no less than 17 — barely under one third — had become casualties in the past three days. Five were killed outright or mortally wounded... When the lost was lengthened by 18 colonels either killed or captured, many of them officers of high promise, slated for early promotion, it was obvious that the Army of Northern Virginia had suffered a loss in leadership from which it might never recover. A British observer was of this opinion. He lauded the offensive prowess of Lee's soldiers, who had marched out as proudly as if on parade in their eagerness to come to grips with their opponents on the ridge across the way; "But they will never do it again," he predicted. And he told why. He had been with the army since Fredericksburg, ticking off the illustrious dead from Stonewall Jackson down, and now on the heels of Gettysburg he asked a rhetorical question of his Confederate friends: "Don't you see your system feeds upon itself? You cannot fill the places of these men. Your troops do wonders, but every time at a cost you cannot afford." (pp. 577-578).

Stripes remained the Union banner throughout the war, the Confederacy had three different flags. The original “stars and bars,” which bore a great resemblance to the United States flag, was replaced after two years of war by a flag bearing a small blue cross in its upper left corner containing white stars against a red background, with a great white field. The flag mistakenly considered the Confederate flag, a blue cross containing white stars stretching from corner to corner against a red background, actually was the Army of Northern Virginia battle flag.

The white residents of Confederate states who served under the Union flag would together have filled out an army larger than any that Richmond fielded throughout the war.

How would he protect her, as weak and wounded as he was? If the two armies were about to shell the town again, he had to find a safe place for her to be. And if the Confederates gained Gettysburg itself, they would probably take him as a prisoner. He needed to make sure that Arabella had a place of safety...

Why do Southerners eat Black Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day? The story of the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas as the first meal on New Year's Day is generally believed to date back to the winter of 1864 - 1865. When Union General William T. Sherman led his invading troops on their destructive march through Georgia, the fields of black-eyed peas were largely left untouched because they were deemed fit only for animals. The Union foragers took everything, plundered the land, and left what they could not take, burning or in shambles. But two things did remain, the lowly peas and good Ol’ Southern salted pork. As a result, the humble yet nourishing black-eyed peas saved surviving Southerners - mainly women, children, elderly and the disabled veterans of the Confederate army - from mass starvation and were thereafter regarded as a symbol of good luck. The peas are said to represent good fortune. Certainly the starving Southern families and soldiers were fortunate to have those meager supplies. According to the tradition and folklore, the peas are served with several other dishes that symbolically represent good fortune, health, wealth, and prosperity in the coming year. Some folks still traditionally cook the black-eyed peas with a silver dime in the pot as a symbol of good fortune. Greens represent wealth and paper money. Any greens will do, but in the South the most popular are collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, and cabbage. Cornbread - a regular staple among Southerners in the absence of wheat - symbolizes gold and is very good for soaking up the juice from the greens on the plate. You should always have some cornbread on hand in your kitchen anyway. Good for dinner and in the morning with syrup. Pork symbolizes bountiful prosperity, and then progressing into the year ahead. Ham and hog jowls are typical with the New Year meal, though sometimes bacon will be used, too. Pigs root forward, so it’s the symbolic moving forward for the New Year. Tomatoes are often eaten with this meal as well. They represent health and wealth. So reflect on those stories when you sit down at your family table and enjoy this humble, uniquely Southern meal every New Year’s Day. Be thankful for what this year did give you in spite of the bad, and hope and pray for better days that are coming ahead for you.

The imperial Russian government's ineffectiveness in World War I had forced the tsar to abdicate in 1917. Following the February Revolution in that year the Provisional Government replaced the tsarist regime, but as a result of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks seized power, executing the tsar and his family, and the Russian Empire collapsed. The Ukrainian Central Rada, or governing council, proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic, but meanwhile the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, still at war with Russia, drove out the Russian army and occupied Ukraine. The Germans supported a coup led by Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), who in April 1918 declared himself the Hetman of All Ukraine, a position he held until the following December, when, following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the German army, he was deposed and fled. It is here, in December 1918, that the novel White Guard begins, in a Ukraine damaged by World War I and engulfed in the Russian Civil War, with all of its confusion, violence, and chaos. As the novel unfolds, the Germans have mostly withdrawn and the hetman, essentially a German puppet, is under siege by Ukrainian nationalist and socialist forces led by Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura (1879-1926), who fought unsuccessfully for Ukraine's independence following the Revolution of 1917. Petlyura's nationalism made him an enemy of the Bolsheviks, and his socialist ideas made him an enemy of the Whites, who were opposed to the Communists. The Russian forces (both political and military) who became known as the Whites fought against the Red Army in the Civil War from 1918 to 1921. Their military arm was known as the White Army, or White Guard. Ideologically quite diverse, the Whites were not so much a single army as a confederation of counterrevolutionary forces loosely united by their anti-bolshevism, and to a lesser extent by the idea of preserving and restoring the Russian monarchy and Russian Empire, as well as by their anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. After the events described in the novel, the Soviet army recaptured Ukraine, driving Petlyura out, and held Kiev in 1919 from February 6 until August 31. From August 31 until about December 16, forces under Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), a general in the imperial Russian army before the Revolution and one of the leaders of the Whites in the Civil War, were in charge. Then, from December 16 the Soviet government was back in the city until May 6, 1920, when it was occupied by the Poles, who on June 11 were forced out by the Red Army. Three centers of power, revealing the basic vectors of all the coups, had taken shape in Kiev: the military district headquarters (which included counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, and White Guards), the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Bolsheviks and other Communists), and the Ukrainian Central Rada (national-ist, independence-oriented, and Petlyurist).

He reported sick on the 2d and left the army. When ready for duty he was assigned about Richmond and the seaboard of North Carolina. He applied to be restored to command of his division in the field, but the authorities thought his services could be used better elsewhere. He resigned his commission in the Confederate service, went to Georgia, and joined Joe Brown’s militia, where he found congenial service, better suited to his ideas of vigorous warfare.

was in the front rank, but didn't fire. I preferred to wait for a good opportunity, when I could take deliberate aim at some individual foe. But when the regiment fired, the Confederates halted and began firing also, and the fronts of both lines were at once shrouded in smoke. I had my gun at a ready, and was trying to peer under the smoke in order to get a sight

such manner as shall seem most likely to conduce to the furtherance of the interests of the Confederate States of

Brigadier General John Buford commanded the 1st Cavalry Division, Army of the Potomac, prior to and during the battle of Gettysburg. This much is accepted by all historians and written accounts of the battle. On most other facts, disagreement begins and on specific facts, varies greatly. The purpose of this paper is to examine the facts as presented in different accounts, discover the differences, and try to determine what is important in terms of the lessons to be learned from the battle. In most accounts, General Buford receives, at least, a great deal of credit for determining the importance of the terrain just south of Gettysburg, for determining that the meeting of the two great armies will take place there, and for deciding that the ground was important enough to hold until the Army of the Potomac can move forward and occupy it: “The significant contribution which Buford’s cavalry made to the final checkmate of the Confederates at Gettysburg has never received adequate recognition.. .. .. with not over 4,000 cavalrymen he delayed the advance of Hill’s corps from Cashtown and Ewell’s corps from Heidlersburg, causing the leading divisions of both to effect premature deployments.. .. . .. . It is not too much to say that Buford’s cavalry was the major instrument that caused the battle to be fought at Gettysburg rather than elsewhere.. .

The most colorful (and color-conscious) opinions were voiced by the southern wing of the Democratic Party. Here are some choice words on the floor of the US Senate from Senator William B. Bate (D-TN), who had served as a major general in the Confederate Army: What is to become of the Philippines and Porto Rico? Are they to become States with representation here from those countries, from that heterogeneous mass of mongrels that make up their citizenship? That is objectionable to the people of this country, as it ought to be, and they will call a halt to it before it is done. Jefferson was the greatest expansionist. But neither his example nor his precedent affords any justification for expansion over territory in distant seas, over peoples incapable of self-government, over religions hostile to Christianity, and over savages addicted to head-hunting and cannibalism, as some of these islanders are.27

Confederacy. Mountainous Rabun County, Georgia, was “almost a unit against secession,” and secret Union societies flourished in the Ozark mountains of northern Arkansas, from which 8,000 men eventually joined the federal army.25 Discontent developed more slowly outside the mountains, with their cohesive communities of intense local loyalties, where slaves comprised only a tiny fraction of the population. It was not simply devotion to the Union, but the impact of the war and the consequences of Confederate policies, that awakened peace sentiment and social conflict. In

The Democrats did play a role in Reconstruction—they worked to block it. The party struck out against Reconstruction in two ways. The first was to form a network of terrorist organizations with names like the Constitutional Guards, the White Brotherhood, the Society of Pale Faces, and the Knights of the White Camelia. The second was to institute state-sponsored segregation throughout the South. Let us consider these two approaches one by one. The Democrats started numerous terror groups, but the most notorious of these was the Ku Klux Klan. Founded in 1866, the Klan was initially led by a former Confederate army officer, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who served two years later as a Democratic delegate to the party’s 1868 national convention. Forrest’s role in the Klan is controversial; he later disputed that he was ever involved, insisting he was active in attempting to disband the organization. Initially the Klan’s main targets weren’t blacks but rather white people who were believed to be in cahoots with blacks. The Klan unleashed its violence against northern Republicans who were accused of being “carpetbaggers” and unwarrantedly interfering in southern life, as well as southern “scalawags” and “white niggers” who the Klan considered to be in league with the northern Republicans. The Klan’s goal was to repress blacks by getting rid of these perceived allies of the black cause. Once again Republicans moved into action, passing a series of measures collectively termed the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1871. These acts came to be known as the Force Bill, signed into law by a Republican President, Ulysses Grant. They restricted northern Democratic inflows of money and weapons to the Klan, and also empowered federal officials to crack down on the Klan’s organized violence. The Force Bill was implemented by military governors appointed by Grant. These anti-Klan measures seem modest in attempting to arrest what Grant described as an “invisible empire throughout the South.” But historian Eric Foner says the Force Bill did markedly reduce lawless violence by the Democrats. The measures taken by Republicans actually helped shut down the Ku Klux Klan. By 1873, the Klan was defunct, until it was revived a quarter-century later by a new group of racist Democrats.

Captain Joseph Frye One of the nicest parks in present day downtown Tampa, Florida, is the Cotanchobee Fort Brooke Park. The 5-acre park, which lies between the Tampa Bay Times Forum (Amalie Arena) and the mouth of the Hillsborough River at the Garrison Channel, is used for many weddings and special events such as the dragon boat races and the duck race. Few people give thought to the historic significance of the location, or to Captain Joseph Frye, considered Tampa’s first native son, who was born there on June 14, 1826. Going to sea was a tradition in the Frye family, starting with his paternal great-grandfather Samuel Frye from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, who was the master of the sloop Humbird. As a young man, Joseph attended the United States Naval Academy and graduated with the second class in 1847. Starting as an Ensign, he served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy until the Civil War, at which time he resigned and took a commission as a Lieutenant in the Confederate Navy. The Ten Years’ War, also known as “the Great War,” which started in 1868 became the first of three wars of Cuban Independence. In October 1873, following the defeat of the Confederacy and five years into the Cuban revolution, Frye became Captain of a side-wheeler, the S/S Virginius. His mission was to take guns and ammunition, as well as approximately 300 Cuban rebels to Cuba, with the intent of fighting the Spanish army for Cuban Independence. Unfortunately, the mission failed when the ship was intercepted by the Spanish warship Tornado. Captain Frye and his crew were taken to Santiago de Cuba and given a hasty trial and before a British warship Commander, hearing of the incident, could intervene, they were sentenced to death. After thanking the members of his crew for their service, Captain Frye and fifty-three members of his crew were put to death by firing squad, and were then decapitated and trampled upon by the Spanish soldiers. However, the British Commander Sir Lambton Lorraine of HMS Niobe did manage to save the lives of a few of the remaining crewmembers and rebels.

Driving Dixie Down In May 1863, two years into the American Civil War, Major-General Ulysses S. Grant captured Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, and forced the Confederate army under Lieutenant-General John C. Pemberton to retreat westward to Vicksburg on the banks of the Mississippi River. Surrounded, with Union gunboats bombarding their positions from behind, Pemberton’s army repulsed two Union assaults but they were finally starved into submission by a grinding siege. On 4 July, Independence Day, Pemberton surrendered. From now on, the Mississippi was firmly in the hands of the North. The South was literally split in two.

Wheelock Commandery 5, Texas, ceased to exist when its 55 members joined the Confederate Army in 1861 and all were subsequently killed.

Yet the Confederate States of America faced significant challenges in waging a successful war for independence. One of its outstanding fighting generals, Irish-born Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, certainly understood that in a protracted conflict, his country did not have the manpower to sustain its armies in the field against a numerically superior foe. His solution to the problem placed patriotism over any desire to leave the peculiar institution inviolate. If the armed forces of the Confederate States employed blacks as combatants, he felt that not only would the disparity in numbers be addressed but also slavery would become an asset to the South rather than a liability. Freedom at the conclusion of honorable service to the Confederacy would offer a choice other than insurrection or escape and enrollment in the Union military for slaves who wished to exert some measure of control over their lives. But there was no time to lose. “Negroes will require much training, training will require time, and there is the danger that this concession to common sense may come too late.”64

Hannibal had no other sure source of reserves but the Gauls of Italy: he was dependent upon them, and the whole success of the expedition was dependent upon him staying alive. His hopes at this time must also have been geared to the possibility of seducing away from Rome the Latin allies, who in many respects formed the bulk of her armies. If he could shatter the confederation that held these states together he could deprive Rome of a principal source of manpower and isolate her. For this reason, both now and in the future, he was careful to make a distinction among the prisoners that he took: Romans were reduced to slave status, but the allies were treated kindly and, whenever possible, sent back to their homes with the message that the Carthaginian had no enmity against them. His war was against Rome.

No State government has the right to make war, raise armies, or conclude treaties of peace. These rights," he said, were "expressly conferred upon the Confederate Government." Far from the draft being unconstitutional, he felt that "the volunteering system . . . was extra-constitutional, if not unconstitutional.

Criticism of Davis was neither new nor unusual, for his Confederacy was by no means a monolithic state. Secession had been imposed upon many loyal Unionists in the South, devoted patriots who, though subdued, remained hostile to the Rebel government; Union conventions had been held in the Confederacy during the war, and thousands of Southerners served in Union armies out of conviction that slavery and secession were twin evils. Many more thousands deserted the Confederate army to spend most of the war at home or in hiding. The more numerous poor whites and small farmers, who owned no slaves and worked their own lands, usually despised the few wealthy planters who controlled the slave system and the political apparatus as well. North Carolina’s Governor Zebulon Vance, in his forthright fashion, had put this issue to Jefferson Davis himself in terms that had become a rallying cry: “It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

Add the shortage of blankets, warm clothing, and vegetables, and the result was likely to be more suffering and more death than had occurred earlier. The war was not over for Hood's army as it came through the gates of Camp Douglas. Another struggle for survival was beginning, and the odds of success were no better in Chicago than at Franklin or Nashville.

Probably the biggest laugh of all that rainy night was at the expense of Private T.C. Green of the Second Regiment. Before the battle Green had been outspoken in the number of Federals he intended killing, and at day's end went through the camp recounting how many of the enemy he had shot before something went wrong with his gun. When a messmate examined the weapon, he found that the gun had not been fired at all, but was full of unexploded charges. In his excitement Green had gone through the motions of loading and firing, but had omitted some essentials, such as changing caps and pulling the trigger, and hence had done absolutely no harm to the enemy.

For its part, the retreating Confederate army killed and enslaved free black men, women, and children, carrying its captives back south. It was literally an army of enslavement.

In a single stroke an inexperienced Episcopal bishop became one of the senior generals in the budding Confederate army.

its more famous neighbor in Lexington, the Virginia Military Institute (150). The outbreak of the Civil War nearly blotted Washington College from view, first by diverting students to Confederate military service (in the 4th, 25th, 52nd, and 58th Virginia Infantry and 14th Virginia Cavalry), and then by attracting the unwanted attention of marauding Union forces under David Hunter in 1864. “Hunters Army” ensured that “all closed doors were broken down” and “Window Glass & Sash were smashed to pieces,” so that the trustees were “compelled to report the buildings in a very dilapidated condition.” By that summer’s end, Washington College barely had a

when her master’s son returned and ordered the slaves to destroy the cotton lest it fall into the hands of the Union Army, they refused to cooperate. “Why for we burn de cotton?” they asked. “Where we get money then for buy clo’ and shoes and salt?” Rather than burn the cotton, the slaves took turns guarding it, “the women keeping watch and the men ready to defend it when the watchers gave the alarm.” In some instances, however, slaves who resisted removal were shot down, even burned to death in the cotton houses. On Edisto Island, where a Confederate raiding party had tried to remove some blacks, “the women fought so violently when they were taking off the men,” a white Charlestonian wrote, “that they were obliged to shoot some of them.”18