George Tillotson from Greene, New York, enlisted with the 89th New York Infantry in November of 1861. This ambrotype (photograph made on glass) and a series of letters from the summer of 1862 remind us that soldiers and their families faced hardships on the home front as well as on the battlefield. George had been in the army for five months and was stationed at Roanoke Island, North Carolina, when his wife, Libby, sent him the photograph featured here. The photograph was damaged in the mail and began a heartbreaking series of correspondence.
April 19, 1862 – "Your letter of the 6th inst
One hundred years ago this weekend, the RMS Titanic sank, claiming the lives over 1,500 passengers and crew. In this account, Dr. Washington Dodge recounts his tale of survival. Written on board the RMS Carpathia during the three-day journey back to New York, this eyewitness account is one of the earliest and most compelling accounts of the disaster. Dodge’s handwriting and sentence phrasing offer a glimpse into his state of mind as he penned his testimony.
Excerpt:
When boat 13 was lowered to A deck to be loaded I went to this deck – After 8 or 10 women had been placed aboard, no [struck:
In 1836, Abraham Lincoln found himself in a tenuous situation. He was engaged to a woman he barely knew and didn’t want to marry. Mrs. Elizabeth Abell had been pushing for a romance between Lincoln and her sister, Mary Owens, whom Lincoln had met briefly in 1833. When Elizabeth went home to visit her family in Kentucky three years later, she said she would bring Mary back to Illinois if Lincoln would agree to marry her. Lincoln jokingly agreed. He realized the consequences of his rash statement when Mary came to New Salem and considered herself engaged. Lincoln immediately regretted his
What would be a better Mother’s Day present than learning that your child would be returning home from war? In 1919, thirty-year-old Lawrence Hopkins of the 305th Engineers was at the Forwarding Camp in Le Mans, France, awaiting orders to return home. On Wednesday, May 7, he wrote his mother in Ashtabula, Ohio, an early Mother’s Day letter in hopes he would be at sea by Sunday. With great excitement he announced the possibility of being home by Decoration Day (Memorial Day):
Forwarding Camp, Le Mans, FranceMay 7, 1919
Dear Mother:
It is my fond hope that this will be my last letter written
When the Civil War broke out, David McNeely Stauffer (1845–1913) was only sixteen years old. While attending Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania from September 1861 through June 1863, he served brief, emergency enlistments when the state of Pennsylvania was threatened by Robert E. Lee’s forces. He joined the 2nd Pennsylvania Emergency Regiment in September 1862 and served until winter. In June 1863, he joined in the defense of Gettysburg with the
Independent Battery of Pennsylvania. When Stauffer’s enlistment expired in January 1864, he briefly joined the Engineering Corps of the
Between the pages of his math exercise book John Barstow jotted down a patriotic tune called "The Amaricans Challing" on January 2, 1777. Carefully written in a youth’s unsteady hand, the text appears to be a transcript of a popular camp song from the Revolutionary era. How this declaration of patriotism found its way into Barstow’s math lessons is unknown. The book is filled with conversion tables for weights and measures, time and money tables, and multiplication and division tables in addition to mathematical problems. One can imagine a young child learning the song from a father or older
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OCTOBER 10 AND NOVEMBER 5, 1863: DAVIS TRIES TO RALLY CONFEDERATE MORALE
The summer of 1863 had been a poor one for the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee’s army was not just repulsed from its invasion of Pennsylvania but bloodily beaten at Gettysburg. At the same time, William S. Rosecrans maneuvered Braxton Bragg’s Confederates out of Middle Tennessee at the cost of fewer than six hundred Union casualties. Farther west, Ulysses S. Grant had at last captured Vicksburg, the strongest Confederate citadel of the Mississippi, and delivered complete control of the "Father of Waters" to the Union. Lee
When most people think of wartime food rationing, they think of World War II. However, civilians were encouraged to do their part for the war effort during World War I as well. This colorful poster by artist Charles E. Chambers was issued by the United States Food Administration to encourage voluntary food conservation. "Food Will Win the War" was the name of the campaign initiated by the newly appointed head of the agency, Herbert Hoover. Food was necessary not only to feed America’s growing Army, but to help relieve famine in Europe, in part to prevent the overthrow of European governments
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MARCH 9, 1864—ULYSSES S. GRANT IS COMMISSIONED AS LIEUTENANT-GENERAL
On March 8, 1864, Ulysses S. Grant and his eldest son, Fred, arrived at Washington, DC. It was the general’s first visit to Washington since 1852, when he had been a young officer. What happened next is fairly well known. The front desk clerk at Willard’s Hotel did not recognize his distinguished guest and assigned him a small room before realizing that the hero of Vicksburg and Chattanooga was standing before him. After struggling to eat a meal at the hotel restaurant as excited onlookers buzzed around him, Grant made his
In October 1862, Mathew Brady opened a photography exhibition at his studio in New York City. Entitled The Dead of Antietam, the exhibition attracted large crowds and brought the war home in a way that news articles and casualty listings could not. On October 20, 1862, an editorial in the New York Times explained that "the dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that
The Emancipation Proclamation stands as the single most important accomplishment of Lincoln’s presidency. The preliminary proclamation, announced on September 22, 1862, served as a warning for Southern states that if they did not abandon the war, they would lose their slaves. More important, it was the first step toward the official abolition of slavery in the United States. While many Northerners were not initially abolitionists, their support of Abraham Lincoln and the Union military, as well as the demonstrated determination of slaves to escape bondage in the South and the courage of
Following the Japanese bombardment of the US Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan and Germany and immediately mobilized the country for war. "Remember Dec. 7th!" is a propaganda poster intended to promote a sense of nationalism and boost support for the war effort. It combines imagery suggesting the destruction of the base—smoke and a tattered American flag—with a quotation from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." Invoking Lincoln could both give comfort to Americans and
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December 17, 1862: Lincoln’s Cabinet Crisis
Less than a week after the disastrous Union defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, 1862, Abraham Lincoln confronted one of the most serious political crises he faced during the war. The debacle fed mounting frustration among Republicans over the administration’s conduct of the war. Led by its Radical members, the Senate Republican caucus tried to force Secretary of State William H. Seward out of the Cabinet. The Radicals accused Seward of opposing vigorous prosecution of the war, exercising undue influence on the President, and
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On April 30, 1789, George Washington was sworn in as our nation’s first president. His wife, Martha Washington, was not at his side. Washington had only received the election results two weeks earlier, on April 14, when Secretary of Congress Charles Thomson arrived at Mount Vernon to notify Washington. He left for the temporary national capital, New York City, two days later and arrived on April 23. He traveled through six states, attending celebrations in cities and towns along the route and being greeted by thousands of citizens who lined the roads. Martha, her two grandchildren, and seven
January 20, 1863: "Mud March" of the Army of the Potomac
After its bloody defeat in December 1862 the Army of the Potomac settled down for the winter around Falmouth, Virginia, on the north bank of the Rappahannock River across from Fredericksburg. Aware that several of his subordinates were actively intriguing for his replacement as the army’s commander, Ambrose Burnside was determined not to sit still for long. He issued orders calling for a march westward, looking to cross the Rappahannock upriver from Fredericksburg and outflank the defensive line held by Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern
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February 23, 1863: Vallandigham Denounces the Draft
What is the proper way for Americans to express political opposition to an ongoing war? How can the party out of power maintain its own identity without appearing disloyal? Can party members oppose the conflict itself and still proclaim themselves patriots? These questions pressed themselves on the Federalists during the War of 1812 and the Whigs during the US–Mexican War and have recurred in recent years, but they took on a special urgency for northern Democrats during the Civil War. (Because a political party system never emerged in the
Sometimes a simple document can open the door to a great story. In this statement dated 1781, Richard Lamb and John Nutter verify that Cuffee Wells enlisted in the Continental Army in May 1777 and earned a bounty of 30 pounds, part of which was given to his master. Likewise, Justice of the Peace Benjamin Huntington confirmed that Cuffee’s commanding officer, Captain Jedediah Hyde of Norwich, "always understood that the money that was given to Wells at his Enlistment Purchased his Freedom." It is not clear why this document was created. It may have been necessary for the processing of some
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There’s no denying the important role that baseball has played in America’s past. It has always been considered more than a game, whether played by professional athletes or kids at the sandlot. This was never more obvious than during World War II. By 1943, the war was raging in Europe and the Pacific. American mothers and fathers sent their sons to war and those who stayed home made whatever sacrifices they could, great or small. President Roosevelt weighed in on the decision to allow baseball to continue in what is now known as the "green light letter" to Major League Baseball commissioner
March 31, 1863: Halleck Instructs Grant
On March 31, 1863, Henry W. Halleck wrote an "unofficial letter" to Ulysses S. Grant "as a personal friend and as a matter of friendly advice."[1] As is often the case in communications between a superior and his subordinate—Halleck was general-in-chief of the Union army, Grant the commander of the Army of Tennessee—the "friendly advice" concerned serious matters: the policy of the Lincoln administration toward slavery and emancipation, the obligation of military officers to faithfully execute government policy, and the essential nature of the war
