In this day and age, newspapers rarely print fiction. Of course, there is the occasional magical story written by a third grade class that appears every once a week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the paper, but for the most part, fictional stories of real substance are not published in newspapers anymore. This was not the case in the 1800's. Appearing in The Valley Star each week was...
An escalating series of events led to armed soldiers charging at an African American mob of one thousand. Although the evening had started with a small group of African Americans watching a trial of engines between the Richmond and the visiting Wilmington, Delaware Fire Companies, police soon arrested an African American man who allegedly attacked the firemen. A riot followed, with the mob hurling...
During April and May, 1867, a number of letters arrived into the Brownlow's Knoxville Whig newspaper. The letters, sent by a number of farmers expressed concerns over the delay of the railroad construction. <br /><br />The farmers worried over two possible delays. The first resulted from the recent state appropriation of 500,000 to the building of the railroad. As a condition for...
On May 13, 1867, Jefferson Davis walked free from prison on bail from Fort Monroe Virginia, after just three months of legal litigation. His bail cost 10,000. The United States had kept him in prison for two years after the collapse of the Confederacy, when the Union army had captured and imprisoned him on May 10, 1865 for treason. Even at the time of Davis' release people predicted that his...
During March and April, 1867, John Rice, the President of the National Bank of Atlanta arrived in the Cherokee Gold Belt of Georgia to investigate the quality of recently mined minerals. He declared the beauty and high value of the gold and quartz specimen qualities. Rice's arrival in the Gold Belt reflected the rapidly growing interest in the mining of minerals in Georgia. Many had declared...
In 1867, Charles Warren Stoddard sent the well-known author William Gilmore Simms a sample of poetry that he, a hopeful young author, had written. On May 1, 1867, Simms replied, congratulating Stoddard on the quality of his poetry and discussing his desire to help young authors whom he felt merited encouragement. These letters began a correspondence between the young author and his mentor that would...
While their husbands were away at war, the women of the South had to leave behind their lives of comfort to assume roles to benefit the Confederate war effort. Many wives whose husbands and sons went to battle were left without a breadwinner and funds. Although Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina, was not a widow at the time of his imprisonment, she faced similar challenges of widows.
Women...
The full story of the Civil War is not complete without mentioning the role that the African Americans played. To this day, there are southern heritage groups that see the Confederate flag as a symbol of honor and sacrifice. In the late-nineteenth century, such perceptions helped to “revise” history to exclude or at least minimize the centrality of African Americans and slavery as part of the...
The Civil War is often noted as the bloodiest war in American history, due to the many casualties from the war. However, historian Guy Hasegawa states “roughly twice as many soldiers in that conflict died from disease as from combat injuries.” Naïve medical care and sanitary conditions were a major reason that so many soldiers died from disease. In America, in the late 1800’s, medical education...
Between April 12, 1861 to May 9, 1865, the Civil War waged claiming the lives of about 620,000 American. The Civil War conflict was a great tragedy, but if could have been worse if it wasn’t for William A. Hammond the surgeon general at the time. It was thanks to his almost single-handed push of a vehicle designed to get medics to the injured faster, and/or the injured out of combat zones.
Known...