Horace Greeley, a Northerner from New York and Republican, took a tour of the American south in 1871 and then returned to New York to deliver an address of his trip to the Union Republican General Committee. Greeley said that the purpose of his trip was to vindicate the North from the popular opinion that the North was trying to oppress the South and to explain to southerners that the northerners...
Francis Leigh Butler ran her plantation on her own. As a white woman, she earned respect from her neighbors for her abilities to oversee the completion of day-to-day work done by her hired black laborers. Butler considered the hired hands to be loyal workers-almost a part of her family. To her dismay, she overheard that one of the men, Peter Track, who had been a favorite had tried to leave the...
Seven years after its creation, West Virginia continued to be less populated than its older, more widely settled eastern counterpart. According to the Encyclopedia of the South, at the end of the Civil War West Virginia was an undeveloped and rural state with a population of only about 400,000, or about one-third that of contemporary Virginia. In part to attempt to counteract this imbalance, as...
The Kingdom of Italy had secured its territorial integrity, seizing Venice from Austria 1866 and ending Rome’s Papal autonomy by conquering the Eternal City four years later. Nestled in the mountains of southern Italy laid the village of Montefalcone. In 1870, the town was awash with celebration—not from its kingdom’s recent conquests but from a single wedding. Fiorita Corso was betrothed...
The Young Lady’s Guide, written in 1870, is a book on how women should live and conduct their lives according to God's will. One of the guide’s goals is to get young women to look at the broader picture and to forget the distractions in their daily lives and instead focus on God. The guide is split in several different sections with each section written by a different author who is experienced...
Kate Drumgoold walked through the door of the school room, the fee for her education in one hand and a Bible in the other. The funds her church had raised to put her through school had been stolen from her, but her passion had not been taken along with it. Saving up her earnings to pay for her schooling had been difficult, but her dream of one day being able to teach fellow former slaves to read...
This letter is from the Secretary of State in 1870, to the Governor of Virginia, officially readmitting the state back into the Union. This comes at about five years after the end of the Civil War. Virginia, of course, leaving during 1861 to join and run the Confederate States of America, Richmond being the capital of the Confederate States. After the Confederacy lost, the whole United States had...
This document is about the public school system in Virginia in 1870. This was the first formal public school system in Virginia. The fault with these school systems is they were exclusive to white people. African Americans were not allowed. The white people who went were very poor as well and these schools were known as “free schools”, or “charity schools”. As time went on during that year,...
The transportations of slaves during the Domestic Slave Trade allowed cotton sales to flourish as well as the income of slave owners. Slave owners knew that transporting a small group of slaves would be more manageable than a larger group in the prevention of riots and allowed more control over them. The domestic slave trade from someone with an abolitionist perspective, would...
Ben Simpson marched onward through the snow and dirt for several weeks, with his mother, sister, and a slew of other slaves at his side. His neck was secured with iron chains that attached him and the others to the horses that lazily dragged their owner, Alex Simpson, toward Austin, Texas from Norcross, Georgia, a distance of nearly a thousand miles. Wanted by authorities for stealing horses,...