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U.S. Civil War History bits

Discussion in 'Military History' started by C.Evans, Jan 19, 2011.

  1. A-58

    A-58 Cool Dude

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    Read up on Camp Douglas, in Chicago, Illinois. Thousands of Confederate soldiers died of starvation, disease and exposure to the elements there, and the yankees had more than enough food and supplies to prevent that from happening. They did it on purpose. In Andersonville, the Confederate guards died at almost the same rate as the POWs they were guarding due to the hardness of the war. The Confederacy could not properly care for it's own soldiers, people or POWs. The Union could.
     
  2. Mutley

    Mutley Active Member

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    Sorry if this has been posted before, but I found this by accident. Its about the Scot's photographer from Paisley, Alexander Gardner. Always find the old style development techniques fascinating
     
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  3. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Found this snippet on my newsfeed-
    "Engineers and technicians have spent the last two months turning live artillery shells, recovered from the mud of Savannah harbor, into inert museum pieces.
    The recovery was part of the efforts to save the wreck of the Confederate ironclad gunboat CSS Georgia this summer to make way for a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredging project. The Georgia, scuttled by her crew to avoid capture by the Union Army during Sherman’s famous March to the Sea in 1864, was scoured by U.S. Navy divers who brought a number of artifacts and cannon to the surface.
    Among the more dangerous items found were pallets of unexploded ordnance in the form of some 170 9-inch Dahlgren and 6.4-inch Brooke projectiles, the vast majority filled with black powder and armed with corroded fuzes.
    Once on the surface, each was remotely drilled into by a pair of technicians behind a cleared blast area shielded by a half-inch steel plate and 5.5-inch thick ballistic glass.
    After the hole was drilled, each shell was soaked and flushed of black powder using first hot water and then MuniRem, a specially formulated solution that chemically neutralizes explosives. Once the explosive has been removed, the techs unscrewed the fuze, leaving the shell fully inert.
    “This is the only job like this I’ve seen,” said Ben Redmond, a retired Marine Corps master EOD technician and senior technical consultant for the project. “Most inerting is done in an industrial setting, not in the field like this.”
    The trick to disarming 170 Civil War artillery shells in the field (VIDEO)
     
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  4. A-58

    A-58 Cool Dude

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    Good read. I've read of this movement before. Nothing really came of it. The driving factor of the idea of creating a city-state out of New York was based on one cold hard fact: $$$. The planters of the South borrowed monies from the bankers in NYC to finance the operations of their plantations. Once the slave states left the Union, the bankers feared losing all their money if war broke out. So they came up with the notion of seceding from the US and staying neutral. Not sure how all that business would've worked out if they tried to make it happen.

    Mayor Wood’s Recommendation of the Secession of New York City | Teaching American History
     
    Last edited: Jan 8, 2018
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  5. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Aye, nothing new under the Sun. London occasionally still threatens to go independent on the rest of us, and I can't help thinking of Passport to Pimlico every time they do.
     
  6. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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  7. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Missed the anniversary by a couple of days-
    "On Friday March 13th, 1863, eighteen-year-old Mary Ryan was at work at the Confederate States Laboratory on Brown’s Island. The small ammunition factory had several hundred employees, most of whom were young women between the ages of twelve and twenty. The work, which often required small hands, was vitally important to the Confederate war effort, which suffered often from shortages in the supply of ammunition.
    The C.S. Laboratory was divided into six departments, and Mary Ryan worked in the last one. Seated at the end of a table with a handful of other employees, she was filling friction primers–the devices used to ignite gunpowder inside a cannon. This was dangerous work. In fact, the superintendent Captain Wesley N. Smith had reminded her of that during his routine inspection of the facility just fifteen minutes prior. Shortly after 11:00 AM, Mary noticed that the primer had gotten stuck and so she struck the table three times to dislodge the primer. Upon the third strike, the primer ignited and an explosion sent her flying upwards. The first explosion ignited other materials in the room, causing a second, much-larger explosion that destroyed the building completely.
    The Richmond Examiner described the initial reactions around the city:"
    Civil War: An Explosion rocks Brown's Island
     
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  8. A-58

    A-58 Cool Dude

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    This had to be tough. A Confederate soldier in the 2nd Va Infantry was from Gettysburg, and was killed during the assault of his unit on Culp's Hill during the Battle of Gettysburg.

    This is a portion of the story lifted from wiki:

    One of the sad stories of the war involved the Culp family, owners of the hill. Two of Henry Culp's nephews were brothers: John Wesley Culp and William Culp. Wesley joined the Confederate States Army (the 2nd Virginia Infantry) and William the Union Army (the 87th Pennsylvania Infantry). Wesley's regiment fought at Culp's Hill, and he was killed in the fighting on his family property on July 3. Ironically, he allegedly was carrying a message from another soldier, a boyhood friend and Gettysburg native John Skelly, just deceased, to "Ginnie" Wade, the only civilian killed during the battle. (His brother William was not present at Gettysburg and survived the war, however, William Culp seemed to have regarded his brother as a traitor, and never spoke of him again.)


     
  9. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Wee mystery for you-
    "Has $55million worth of lost gold from the Civil War era been found in central Pennsylvania?
    That's what locals seem to believe after FBI agents, Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and treasure hunters Dennis and Kem Parada were seen digging around a remote area in Benezette Township, called Dents Run.
    Dennis and his son Kem, the owners of the treasure hunting organization Finders Keepers, have claimed for years that 52 gold bars were buried under a fire pit at Dents Run more than 150 years ago during the Battle of Gettysburg.
    The gold bars are believed to be worth an estimated $55million.
    According to WJAC, the father and son, along with dozens of government and state officials were set up off Route 55 in Benezette Township on Tuesday.
    A spokesperson for the FBI said they could not discuss why agents were at Dents Run, revealing only that it was conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity.
    The FBI also ordered Dennis and Kem not to discuss what was going on at the site.
    The father and son duo, another treasure seekers, believe the bars were hidden during the Battle of Gettysburg when Abraham Lincoln ordered a gold shipment to pay union soldiers.
    According to the tale, a Union wagon train left Wheeling, West Virginia with 52 bars of gold each weighing 50 pounds. Some accounts claim the wagon was carrying 26 gold bars.
    The wagon train was to travel from Wheeling to Ridgway, Pennsylvania to Harrisburg, but never made it to its destination. The wagon got to St Marys and that was the last time it was seen.
    The wagons and dead soldiers were later found - but the not the rumored gold."
    FBI at site where $55M in gold rumored to be buried | Daily Mail Online
     
  10. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    "WASHINGTON, March 16, 2018 — During the Civil War era, the Federal Government needed to expand its workforce, but the jobs paid too little for most qualified men to even consider the vacancies. So the Government tried a new approach to filling its personnel shortage: It opened its payrolls to women for the first time.
    Jessica Ziparo, author of This Grand Experiment: When Women Entered the Federal Workforce in Civil-War Era Washington, DC, recently told an audience at the National Archives that women from around the nation flooded Washington with applications, seeking the opportunity for better wages and intellectually challenging work. They also found career paths fraught with discrimination, prejudice, and harassment. The women persisted, however, and ultimately succeeded in making their presence in the federal workforce permanent.
    Ziparo, a historian and attorney who earned her doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University and her law degree from Harvard University, shared the story of these pioneering women who blazed a trail in the federal sector—recalling their struggle for equal rights, equal opportunities, and fair wages. The women were glad for the work, though their salaries were often just a fraction of that earned by their male counterparts doing the same job.
    "It was ironic that the government hired women because they could pay them so little, because the women wanted these jobs in the government because they paid so much—so much more than women could earn in other lines of work” in the private sector, Ziparo said.
    She explained how this would eventually be a point of great contention for the women, who in future decades would seek equal pay for equal work.
    Ziparo said the new female federal employees challenged societal gender norms and carved out a place for independent women in Washington. As the number of women grew in the federal workforce, the landscape of the city changed as well to reflect the changing population. New shops emerged. New housing options surfaced. Women became a recognizable market in DC. It was a time of evolution within the nation’s capital."
    Women Pave Way to Federal Employment
     
  11. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    As usual, found this while looking for something else-
    "Vivandieres, sometimes known as cantinieres, were women who followed the army to provide support for the troops. Ideally, a vivandiere would have been a young woman—the daughter of an officer or wife of a non-commissioned officer—who wore a uniform and braved battles to provide care for wounded soldiers on the battlefield.
    The history of vivandieres can be traced to the French Zouave regiments in the Crimean War. By 1859, many local militia regiments in the United States had adopted the name "Zouave," wore colorful uniforms, and adopted the practice of having a "daughter of the regiment" in their ranks. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, these regiments—in both the North and the South—answered the call for troops. Vivandieres saw most of their service during the early years of the war. By September 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant ordered that all women be removed from military camps in his theater.
    Vivandieres did not fight in battles but were often armed, earned honors, and were sometimes captured by the enemy. Their most important contribution was the essential medical care they provided as field nurses. As battles raged, vivandieres made their way through the wounded offering immediate medical care. Calculating the exact number of women who served as vivandieres is nearly impossible. Neither North nor South recognized the service of vivandieres and they are rarely mentioned in official records. Their courage and brave deeds are recorded in personal accounts and post-war regimental histories. While we cannot put a name to the young woman in this photograph, there are a few vivandieres whose names have become symbolic of all those who served:
    Sarah Taylor – 1st Tennessee (US) – prisoner of war
    Marie Tepe – Collis’ Zouaves – awarded the Kearny Cross
    Eliza Wilson – 5th Wisconsin
    Ella Gibson – 49th Ohio
    Lucy Ann Cox – 13th Virginia
    Kady Brownell –1st and 5th Rhode Island
    Bridget Divers – 1st Michigan Cavalry
    Annie Etheridge – 3rd and 5th Michigan – awarded the Kearny Cross"
    Women in the Civil War: Vivandieres | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
     
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  12. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    This looks familiar, but nothing came up when I searched.
    "Civil War pension records offer a rich source of details for anyone researching U.S. Civil War soldiers and their wives. Unlike Union pensions which were issued by the federal government and are held by the National Archives, Confederate pension records were issued by the states in which the veteran lived at the time of his application. Some states only offered pensions to maimed (lost a limb), wounded or indigent soldiers, while others eventually extended pension rights to veterans' widows as well. Some states did eventually open up pensions to all Confederate veterans for old age, etc. It wasn't uncommon for a Confederate veteran to move to a nearby state for better pension benefits.
    In 1958, the U.S. government opened up federal pensions to surviving Confederate veterans and their widows even though they or their husbands had fought against the government. Given that this was almost 100 years after the start of the Civil War, more people took advantage of this mostly symbolic gesture than you might think; two Confederate veterans and more than one thousand Confederate widows were added to the federal Civil War pension rolls in 1958.
    Confederate pensions prior to 1958 were not awarded by the U.S. federal government and are not in the custody of the National Archives. Instead, Confederate pension records are typically found in the custody of the state archives or library. Many southern states have indexes to the Confederate pensions available online, and some (including North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Virginia) even have digitized copies of the full pension applications or other pension records. In most cases these records are nowhere near as in-depth or rich as federal Union pension records, but they still offer the opportunity for genealogical discoveries."
    Where To Find Confederate Pension Records Online
     
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  13. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Can't post a link to this since it's on FB, so here's a brief resume.
    "The Civil War Trust Facebook Live Team has landed in California and we are ready to kick off four days of California in the Civil War Live! Keep track of where we are traveling and when we are filming and join us for this West Coast adventure."
     

    Attached Files:

  14. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    "On this day 157 years ago, the Battle of Blackburn’s Ford was fought during an extremely hot and humid afternoon. The battle occurred several miles south of Centreville, Va., near where present-day Route 28 crosses Bull Run. There were 83 casualties for the Union and 68 casualties for the Confederacy during the small but fierce battle, which lasted a few hours.
    After the battle, some of the Union dead were buried in shallow graves on the south side of Centreville. As the decades passed, the soldiers’ gravesite transformed from a field into a patch of scrubby, pine woods, and the grave markers disappeared. Over time, the graves were forgotten.
    Fast-forward to June 1994, and I was metal-detecting a wooded lot on the south side of Centreville with the hope of finding Civil War relics. My detector signaled deep, ferrous readings. I dug a large hole about 15 inches into the ground and discovered a group of large nails. They were coffin nails. They surrounded a well-preserved skeleton wearing a faded, partially decomposed wool uniform with brass, military eagle buttons. It was a ghastly and unsettling discovery.
    I filled in the hole and reported the grave. Two years later, teams from the Smithsonian Institution and Fairfax County supervised an archaeological dig to excavate the grave. In the process, five more graves were found.
    The soldiers in the graves did not have ID tags, which did exist during the Civil War, but a variety of clues found in their graves, including forensic data from analysis of the bones at the Smithsonian Institution, helped identify the soldiers.
    Their deaths were tracked to one of the first battles of the Civil War — the Battle of Blackburn’s Ford — which occurred July 18, 1861, and the hot weather may have played a role in determining why the soldiers were buried in shallow graves in Centreville.
    The soldiers were later dubbed the “Centreville Six,” and below is an abbreviated story of how the men were killed, how they were identified and how the soldiers were returned home for burial in 2006, 145 years after their deaths."
    www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/07/18/the-forgotten-graves-of-soldiers-killed-157-years-ago-during-the-oppressively-hot-battle-of-blackburns-ford/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3897db4f63a3
     
  15. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Don't believe this has been covered before.
    "In the artificial quiet following the Union army defeat at the battle of Bull Run in July 1861, U.S. naval strategists, moving along unexplored paths toward a new and more effective blockade, stumbled, by trial and error, upon the discovery that command of the sea—which the Union Navy enjoyed—could be used for opening new land fronts along the miles of Confederate coasts and inland waterways. In effect, Union army strategists could set up a true invasion by sea, a “second front” that would complement the overland drive from the Union and border states south to control Confederate territory. This second front would be a series of major interforce operations that would be developed so steadily, so relentlessly, and in such a ubiquitous way that it could threaten disaster for the South. This idea of an amphibious strategy, which was a decisive element in defeating the South, had “many fathers.”
    For example, one cannot deny that old General-in-Chief Winfield Scott’s earliest idea of strangling the Confederacy by blockading it along the Atlantic coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and the rivers, even if basically a passive one, had at its base an intuition of a new use of combined naval and land power. Although he had relied “greatly on the sure operation of a complete blockade of Atlantic and Gulf ports,” such a blockade to this time had proved to be ineffective. To address the problem of the blockade, the Navy created what amounted to a true operations office, a “Blockade Board” appointed by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles in May 1861. The board, whose importance has usually been underrated by historians, included representatives of the Army, Navy, and Coast Survey."
    Warfare History Network » The “Second Front” of the American Civil War
     
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  16. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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  17. USMCPrice

    USMCPrice Idiot at Large

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    Really a very poorly written article or an author that doesn't understand the subject. He totally ignored two of the most important functions of American Civil War cavalry reconnaissance and screening of the main army. The focus of his article appears to be the massed cavalry charge against infantry, something that was rare in the civil war. He also underestimates the value of the raid on enemy operations, especially in the western theater huge numbers of troops were tied down protecting rail lines, supply depots and bridges.
     
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  18. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    Concur...But, then again, most of that website's articles are. They just end...As if the author has reached his word limit and just cuts it off.

    The author apparently did not think this article through...
    He states
    Problem is, at least for the CSA, it was not about mass. Most of their cavalry commanders were quite independent-minded, and had their own ideas about how things should be done. This led to friction within the chain-of-command. To a great extent, this pertains mostly to the West, but JEB Stuart was also guilty of this, although Lee tended to keep him on a very loose leash.

    Then, in one paragraph he states
    First, this was at the beginning of the war...Horse prices for the US Government would rise to $190 later in the war, and for the CSA, horse prices would rise to $3,000 towards the end of the war.
    Second, in the next paragraph he undercuts himself with this sentence
    It was not costing the CSA a penny, their cavalry troops brought their own mounts...At least early in the war.
     
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  19. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    I agree with you USMC; thought I had actually written that in the OP and just noticed I didn't.
    As you say, the author only seems to be thinking in terms of mass cavalry charges gaining decisive advantages. Cavalry achieved a lot more by infiltration, even if there was no instant glory involved.
     
  20. RichTO90

    RichTO90 Well-Known Member

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    He read Paddy Griffith of course...I still cringe at Paddy's remark that if only Pickett's Division was a division of Cuirassier's the charge would have turned out differently. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
    Lord God, but we seem to have developed a surfeit of stupid anymore.
     
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