During the Civil War, a woman’s place was in the home, tending to the children, tidying up the house, and cooking dinner for their husbands. In many cases, women were not considered equal. Many would believe that, that is true and that is exactly how it went, but those people would be wrong. In fact, many women actually fought in the Civil War. While many were either nurses, formed clubs...
Early in 1861 citizens of the Arch Street Church examined their lifestyles and made sure that they were in line with God. Reverend Wadsworth gave a sermon to his southern congregation based around the idea of how the 'American' people had come to a point where they needed help from Him to get their lives back to the way that God had intended them to live.
He talked of how the whole...
At noon on December 26, 1860, two cannon shots sounded throughout Charleston Harbor. Six days earlier, the state of South Carolina seceded from the Union. The gun shots were a pre-arranged signal for the federal troops stationed in Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island, located a few miles from Charleston. Under the command of Major Robert Anderson, the troops heard the signal and began to...
Political propaganda was not unique to the nineteenth-century South. The Staunton Spectator published an article, in its paper for January 8, 1861, which depicted a French man who, ave loss ma vote The article was published in a broken English-French hybrid language, intended to show that he was indeed a foreigner. The immigrant explained how he had work ver hard tree four months for Messer...
The Alabama Convention convened in Montgomery as delegates arrived to vote on secession. After long debates and delays, the convention voted 61 to 39 in favor of secession. White Alabamans felt threatened by the North and the Republican Party. Alabama was a strong slave state who would suffer great economic loss if the institution of slavery were revoked. “The monetary loss of slave property...
On December 17, 1860, a convention formed in the South Carolinian capital of Columbia to debate and confront the single most important decision facing the state since voting on independence from Great Britain over 80 years earlier. As fate would have it, the city of Charleston would be the one to hear the verdict on secession first. We, the People of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled,...
Prior to the Secession of the Confederate States, many people in the United States wanted a compromise in order to prevent secession and the Civil War that would follow. James McPherson noted that in order for the Senate to filter through the proposed compromises they formed the...
On December 14, 1860, just six days before South Carolina seceded from the United States of America, men in Frederick County, Virginia met to discuss the possible results of secession and how to go about preventing it. Mr. Conrad delivered a speech on the subject to the meeting in which he discussed the ills inflicted on the southern states by the North such as disregard for run away slave laws...
Just days before South Carolina seceded from the United States in December of 1860, an article titled “Coming South” was printed in a South Carolina newspaper, the Abbeville Press. The article included a letter written by a Northern Gentleman who wanted to support Southerner’s interests in rebelling against the abolitionist North. He believed that the South had been tolerant of the...
Writing from Ouachita, Louisiana on December 4, 1860, Sarah Lois Wadley, caught up in the sentiments of secession and northern oppression, describes a famous sermon delivered in New Orleans on November 29, 1860, which her father showed to her in writing. Delivered by Benjamin Morgan Palmer of the First Presbyterian Church, this sermon advocated southern secession in defense of its providential trust...