Episodes Around: 18620627

  1. Slave Family Gets Smuggled to John Clark's Trader's Yard
    date 1861 to 1863map ST LOUIS, Missouritags African-Americans, Crime/Violence, Economy, Law, Migration/Transportation, Slavery

    In 1861, it was illegal for Missourian traders to sell slaves to slaveholders in a different state. That did not prevent Captain Tirrell from taking Mattie Jackson, her brother, and her sister away from their mother and putting them onto a boat headed to Memphis. However, before the boat left St. Louis, Union policemen stopped the boat and returned the young slaves to their master. The Union policemen...

  2. War preparation
    date 1862map ORLEANS, Louisianatags War

    In the midst of the war, factories were steady at work manufacturing gun carriages and turning cotton wagons and drags into army wagons. All commercial businesses were suspended and the ships were cleared out due to the notice of the Union blockade in the spring of 1862. New Orleans would have seemed a deserted city if it were not for the bustling movements of the Third Regiment of Louisiana Volunteers...

  3. Soldier Conditions and Morale
    date 1862map HENRICO, Virginiatags Health/Death, War

    Soldier conditions throughout the Civil War, especially for the Confederacy were far from inspiring. All units from Virginia through Texas experienced poor camp conditions. Many soldiers wrote home complaining about the high occurrence of death and the inability of the sick to recover.

    J.B. Robertson was a colonel in the fifth Texas Infantry and often corresponded with Governor Lubbock....

  4. Pauline Cushman Gains Trust of the Rebels: An Episode from Her Life
    date 1862map JEFFERSON, Kentuckytags Crime/Violence, Race-Relations, War, Women

    Pauline Cushman was born Harriet Wood in the South, on June 10, 1833. Living the beginning of her life in New Orleans, she eventually moved with her family to northern Michigan where she first discovered her love of the theatre. By the age of eighteen she moved to New York to try her luck at being an actress and stage performer. In homage to Charlotte Cushman, her favorite performer, Harriet legally...

  5. Reverend McGill Offers His Religious Views on Slavery
    date 1862map PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvaniatags Church/Religious-Activity, Slavery, War

    Reverend Alexander T. McGill believed very strongly in the 1860s that slavery should be abolished because it "degrades and destroys the children of men."

    Slavery needed to be abolished immediately, but slaves needed to be educated first, because, "neither slavery perpetuated, for its own sake, nor slavery abolished before its subjects are educated for freedom will comport with the determination...

  6. The Battle of Shiloh: Through the Eyes of a Union Soldier
    date 1862map MARION, Tennesseetags Civil War, Battle

    The battle of Shiloh was fought in southwestern Tennessee in April of 1862. Confederates started the battle in an attempt to drive General Grant's army from the Tennessee River. Among the Union troops present, Samuel Bennett of the 26th Kentucky Volunteers kept a diary and wrote down his thoughts of the battle. For him the battle began when he left Savanna for Pittsburg Landing. It was at...

  7. Van Evrie offers evidence for the necessity of maintaining Slavery
    date 1862map NEW YORK, New Yorktags Slavery, Economy, trade relations

    Van Evrie's thirty page pamphlet, written in 1862 used the example of the West Indies, and with the help of statistics and examples, demonstrated how slavery in the West Indies benefited the United States of America. It also showed how eventual abolition in the United States would be a failure to both Southern States and Northern States.

    Throughout the nineteenth century, the islands...

  8. Southerners Interactions With Northern Soldiers
    date March 14, 1862 to July 7, 1862map SHENANDOAH, Virginiatags Crime/Violence, War, Women

    On March 14, 1862 in Shenandoah County, Virginia three Union soldiers marched to the door of Sigismunda S. Kimball, the wife of a southern planter, and demanded supplies. The soldiers threatened Mrs. Kimball saying they had plenty of ladies prisoners and continued to torment her. On July 6, 1862 two Yankee soldiers came up to the house and demanded for the key to the corn house, saying they had...

  9. Armed Slaves
    date June, 1862 to September, 1862map ORLEANS, Louisianatags African-Americans, Slavery, War

    Armed and prepared for confrontation, runaway slaves knew that their link to freedom was right before their eyes.It was the perfect opportunity to leave the plantation when the Union forces arrived in New Orleans. Many of their masters were away at war and the women were the only ones that stood in the way of freedom. In a period of three months in 1862, large groups of slaves armed with cane knives,...

  10. Hood and His Texans at the Battle Gainess Mills
    date June 27, 1862map HANOVER, Virginiatags War

    Courageously "march[ing] under a constantly increasing shower of shot and shell," General John Bell Hood and his fighting Texans battled their war towards a Union embankment and on to glory. The stage was the Battle of Gaines's Mills on June 27th, 1862, and it was up to Hood and his men to lead the charge to Confederate victory. This was the battle, as Hood describes it in his memoir, which...