In September of 1870 the Shenandoah Herald reported a conversation overheard between General William Tecumseh Sherman (U.S.) and General Nathan Bedford Forrest (formerly C.S.A) on a riverboat somewhere on the Mississippi River. The article reported that Sherman explained to Forrest the trouble he had created for him filling not only his every waking thought, but his dreams as well. Forrest...
The morning of July 11, 1870, was much like any other in Patona, Alabama: quiet. The city's two main roads were still, the farms and fields hot with the summer sun; the rural environment uninterrupted. The only sound for miles was that of a train barreling down the Rome and Dalton railroad.
The events both inside and outside of the train did not reflect the peace and quiet that lent itself...
Just five years after the end of the Civil War, tension was already brewing within the majority Republican party of Missouri. Because of the newly drafted Missouri Constitution of 1865, the term for the governor was reduced to two years and thus Governor Joseph McClurg was faced with having to win reelection in 1870. A staunch protectionist and prohibitionist, Governor McClurg was strongly in...
On the morning of Wednesday, October 12, 1870, General Robert E. Lee passed away from pneumonia while surrounded by his family at home in Lexington, Virginia. General Lee gained celebrity from his service as a general in the Confederacy during the Civil War. The pneumonia followed a stroke that had occurred two weeks earlier. Despite death looming, Lee maintained composure that he accumulated over...
The Chinese workers were wide-eyed with anticipation when they arrived at Edward Gay's St. Louis plantation in Iberville Parish, Louisiana on October 26, 1870. The welcome that the workers recruited from California received when they stepped foot on the rich white Gay family's land was far from hospitable. Moon-Ho Jung's Coolies and Cane frankly describes the scene: Gay's...
The Williamson Journal of Franklin, Tennessee announced the local marriage of Mary A Stinebaugh and Rev. Henry J. Bradford in late 1870. The outspoken Mary Stinebaugh graduated from Oberlin College and became a Methodist preacher before her marriage. Right before her wedding ceremony she preached before the entire conference in session. Afterwards she promptly stepped down to the altar to get married....
The Ku Klux Klan began its attempts to undermine the formulating North Carolina state government in 1868. Their attempts to destroy Reconstruction efforts and institute white supremacy created a state of lawlessness and violence in the state of North Carolina. It was pattern that followed the Ku Klux Klan throughout the South. In this the heyday of the Klan, it found support even in the highest...
In August 1865 at the age of fifty-eight, only four months after surrendering at Appomattox Robert E. Lee accepted the position of President of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. The New York Times talked of Lee in glowing terms about how he accepted this humble position because of noble and patriotic motives. Then added it would only be a short time until people came to love him...
The New York Tribune reported on June 13, 1874 about a scandal involving multiple frauds in the Western Federal Court District of Arkansas. The alleged acts of fraud were investigated by the House Committee on Expenditures in the Department of Justice as early as July 1, 1870. The purpose of the investigation was the look into discrepancies of the district's expenses and general management....
On a large plantation called New Providence in Mississippi, a family constructed a birth record of sorts for their slaves. The records list the name of the child and the month, day and year in which he or she was born beginning in 1839 and finally ending in 1870. There is not the expected steep decline of births towards the end of the list. The Civil War supposedly emancipated the slaves in 1865,...