Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Civil War
The fabric of history is often woven of surprising threads: the chance meeting, the extravagant whimsey of fate. No better illustration of this can be found than the string of events surrounding the table in Wilmer McLean’s parlor upon which Ulysses S.
A Union veteran talks of life in a prison camp: it was bad, yet there were times one could recall happily
The reality of the Civil W;ir prison camp has long .since gone from Ii u man knowledge, The camps themselves have vanished, although in a few places there are quiet parks to mark their sites, each with a cemetery: thousands of men died.
From the American Civil War to the beginning of America’s involvement in the Second World War is a long time, and the two things apparently have very little relation with one another.
The first modern war correspondent won a nickname, much Northern ill will, and a lasting reputation out of his account of a famous battle
His shrewd handling of the Radical Republican bid for power at the end of 1862 established him as the unquestioned leader of the Union
On the flaming Kansas-Missouri border the name of Quantrill struck terror in men’s hearts. He was a cruel and ruthless guerrilla who burned, robbed, and killed without mercy; but legend made of him a hero dashing and bold
Was the old South solidly for slavery and secession? An eminent historian disputes a long-cherished view of that region’s history
Flags flew and champagne flowed when the Czar’s ships anchored in New York Harbor. Fifty years later we learned the reason for their surprise visit
Surprised and almost overwhelmed, he stubbornly refused to admit defeat. His cool conduct saved his army and his job
The draft riots of 1863 turned a great city into a living hell.
Upon the clash of arms near a little Maryland creek hung the slave’s freedom and the survival of the Union
At Fort Wagner the Negro soldier was asked to prove the worth of the “powerful black hand”
In the spring of 1863 the Union government tried hard to break into the strongly defended harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
On the eve of the Civil War differing loyalties sent some West Pointers north, others south, but their academy friendship survived the conflict.
“The President came forward and the sun burst through the clouds.”
Missives, one by Mark Twain, the other by Walt Whitman, reflect the impact of the Civil War on the nation.
Hardly a person in America was untouched by the Civil War, and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman were no exceptions. Because they were perhaps the most distinctly “American” writers of their time, their reactions to the conflict are particularly interesting.
Two adroit diplomats successfully prevented an open breach between London and Washington during the Civil War
The Civil War soldier marched to his own individualist cadence, but he was much like today’s G. I.
If Buchanan had met the Kansas problem firmly we might have avoided civil war
The fourth in a series on TIMES OF TRIAL IN AMERICAN STATECRAFT
Along the Mississippi the spirit of vanished culture lingers in the ruined columns of the great plantations
A southern woman’s memoir of a by-gone era
There are many ways of looking at the now-vanished plantation society of the pre-Civil War South. One of them is the way of legend—white-pillared plantation, a leisured and courtly life centering in it, charming women and gallant men consciously living up to a tradition which has lingered on as a memory long after the reality has gone.
A small bit of that legend—faithful to the magnolia-and-roses tradition, but embodying an authentic fragment of real human experience—is presented here, in a memoir written years ago by Cornelia Barrett Ligon, who spent her girlhood on Newstead Plantation, near Jackson, Mississippi, and who in 1932, as very aged woman, set down her reminiscences of the old days. From notes she wrote and dictated, her daughter Lucile Ligon Cope of Port Arthur, Texas, has put together the following account of what life on legendary Old South plantation was like, and how the war finally came to the plantation and ended an era.
AMERICAN HERITAGE presents this memoir as an interesting fragment of the legend and the tradition of fabulous Dixie.
Our American heritage is greater than any one of us.
An 1857 12-pound Napolean cannon still guards the battlefield at Gettysburg. Photo by Craig M. Fildes.
The sun goes down every evening over the muzzle of a gun that has been a museum piece for nearly a century, and where there was a battlefield there is now a park, with green fields rolling west under the sunset haze to the misty blue mountain wall. You can see it all just about as it used to be, and to look at it brings up deep moods and sacred memories that are part of our American heritage.
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