“The Civil War not only changed American politics. It also changed our law,” said Albany law professor Paul Finkelman, co-chairman of the conference. “The modern law of war comes directly from the Civil War. The war also fundamentally altered the Constitution, leading to the abolition of slavery, securing citizenship for African Americans and enfranchising backs on the same basis of whites.”

The war’s effect on American law is something that’s still felt to this day.  This upcoming conference of legal academics promises to be very interesting indeed.

Conference examines Civil Wars influence on law.

The whole Springfield Gazette was one sheet of paper, and it was all about Lincoln. Only him. Other people only came into the document in conjunction with how he experienced life at that moment. If you look at the Gazette picture above, you can see his portrait in the upper left-hand corner. See how the column of text under him is cut off on the left side? Stupid scanned picture, I know, ugh. But just to the left of his picture, and above that column of text, is a little box. And in that box you see three things: his name, his address, and his profession attorney.

The first column underneath his picture contains a bunch of short blurbs about what’s going on in his life at the moment – work he recently did, some books the family bought, and the new games his boys made up. In the next three columns he shares a quote he likes, two poems, and a short story about the Pilgrim Fathers. I don’t know where he got them, but they’re obviously copied from somewhere. In the last three columns he tells the story of his day at the circus and tiny little story about his current life on the prairie.

Some of the comments compare this kind of hoax to Lincoln’s “tall tales” (apparently mistaking Lincoln for Mark Twain), but the difference is, Lincoln’s jokes were actually funny.

via Abraham Lincoln Filed a Patent For Facebook First.

To say the least!  Reading Martin Delany’s biography reminds me of a memorial plaque I saw in Paris, chronicling the life of a poor orphan boy who grew into one of the greatest generals of his time, with a truckload of other major accomplishments along the way.   Most “Great Men” have a much shorter CV than Delany’s, yet his name has not been remembered as well as others from his day.  It’s worth a read of this bio to make up for that.

via Martin Delany – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

One that has been in my library – and woefully neglected – for decades is Sam Watkins’ famous Co. Aytch, whose original subtitle “A sideshow of the big show” seems to have been dropped.  This is a shame, as it’s a terrific précis of Watkins’ memoirs. He repeatedly warns us that he was but a lowly “high private”, and was but one of the millions of faceless men and boys who fought the war.  Like all old soldiers, he revels in his anecdotes and tall tales, and sombrely recounts some of the horrors he witnessed.

To do this is but a pastime and pleasure, as there is nothing that so much delights the old soldier as to revisit the scenes and battlefields with which he was once so familiar, and to recall the incidents, though trifling they may have been at the time.

His unmilitary descriptions of battle and tactics are humorously rendered in sound effects and grumbles, as befits a soldier of the line.

After marching four or five miles, we “about faced” and marched back again to within two hundred yards of the place from whence we started. It was a “flank movement,” you see, and had to be counted that way anyhow. Well, now as we had made the flank movement, we had to storm and take the Federal lines, because we had made a flank movement, you see. When one army makes a flank movement it is courtesy on the part of the other army to recognize the flank movement, and to change his base. Why, sir, if you don’t recognize a flank movement, you ain’t a graduate of West Point.

Watkins is good at relaying colorful asides about life in the Rebel ranks. This passage illustrates both the private soldiers’ contempt for staff officers (something you’d never hear about in the books by the “big bugs” under whom he served) and how Sam wasn’t above usurping their privileges when it suited him:

[The average staff officer and courier were always called "yaller dogs," and were regarded as non-combatants and a nuisance, and the average private never let one pass without whistling and calling dogs. In fact, the general had to issue an army order threatening punishment for the ridicule hurled at staff officers and couriers. They were looked upon as simply "hangers on," or in other words, as yellow sheep-killing dogs, that if you would say "booh" at, would yelp and get under their master's heels... In fact, later in the war I was detailed as special courier and staff officer for General Hood, which office I held three days. But while I held the office in passing a guard I always told them I was on Hood's staff, and ever afterwards I made those three days' staff business last me the balance of the war. I could pass any guard in the army by using the magic words, "staff officer." It beat all the countersigns ever invented. It was the "open sesame" of war and discipline.]

One of the best reasons to read the memoir is for the feel of living alongside Watkins and his comrades. Between the horrors of battle, the soldiers had some memorably enjoyable times, and Watkins – a cad and a cutup – would’ve made for a fun companion across four years of hard marching. He certainly was across 200 pages.

As long as I was in action, fighting for my country, there was no chance for promotion, but as soon as I fell out of ranks and picked up a forsaken and deserted flag, I was promoted for it… And had I only known that picking up flags entitled me to promotion and that every flag picked up would raise me one notch higher, I would have quit fighting and gone to picking up flags, and by that means I would have soon been President of the Confederate States of America.

There’s a reason Watkins’ story is so heavily quoted in narratives and documentaries about the war.  This is a tale told far less often, and far more endearingly, than the dry, dusty military memoirs.  Every Civil War bookshelf needs some Sam Watkins.

The map plots more than 3,000 emancipation-related events from 1861-1865 in 10 categories that range from government actions to abuse of African-Americans. An additional 50,000 entries show Union troop locations during the Civil War, making it easy to see the impact of opportunity on an animated timeline of the war years.

“It tells us that the end of slavery was this really complicated process that happened all over the South, but more in some places than others during the war,” said Scott Nesbit, associate director of the lab.

“The chance for freedom came about on water and on rails. That’s where the Union troops were. But at some places in the South, people remained enslaved the entire war, long after the Emancipation Proclamation.

“And, just because you get to Union lines doesn’t mean you’re going to start having a good time. These first years of freedom, if we can even call it that, were filled with coercion and danger. … (In the contraband camps,) African-Americans were treated as essentially free, as free as someone can be who is impressed into service by the military and not allowed to leave.”

via UR effort maps the end of slavery | Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Part of the reason Buchanan got the party nomination in the presidential race of 1856 was that he was the least of three evils. President Millard Fillmore, of the Whig “Know Nothing” party, ran for re-election and was challenged by John C. Fremont, the Republican nominee. Both Fremont and Fillmore had been tainted, however, by the Civil War-like conditions over the Kansas question. Namely, should Kansas enter the Union as a free state or a slave state?

Buchanan had been out of the country for most of the fighting over Kansas, serving three years as Minister to England. He beat Fremont by only half a million votes; Fillmore got about 900,000 votes. Fremont carried eleven free states, Buchanan only five. But Buchanan carried every slave state except Maryland.

It’s possible that Buchanan doomed his own presidency early on, simply by announcing that he would not seek re-election in 1860. That made him a not-quite-lame duck, and the party leadership passed to Senator Stephen Douglas.

via Happy Birthday, President Buchanan, You Lame-O | Who2 Biographies.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield has long proclaimed that an 1850s-era stovepipe hat in the museum’s possession belonged to Lincoln.

But this month, after Dave McKinney of the Chicago Sun-Times began looking into the matter, museum officials admitted they can’t prove it.

via Editorial: The mystery of Lincoln’s hat – Chicago Sun-Times.

Civil War Home Page

Hindsight can hardly capture the dynamic of the chaos at Ball’s Bluff. But the historian Richard F. Miller has emphasized the absence of maps as contributing to the outcome. Had Stone known more of the difficult topography, perhaps he wouldn’t have sent across anything more than reconnaissance units across the river. Union troops had occupied Harrison’s Island — directly across from Ball’s Bluff — since Oct. 4, long enough to map the region, or at least to recognize the daunting obstacles that lay across the river. And in sending the initial reconnaissance patrol, Stone might have been seeking to improve knowledge of the area…

Sneden’s beautiful map of Ball’s Bluff was drawn a few weeks after the battle, and includes some errors such as the identification of the 40th Massachusetts, which was not there. But notice how he emphasizes the terrain, and thus vividly conveys the sense that Union forces were trapped not just by the Confederates, but by the landscape itself. Yet the terrain took on importance only because of the battle, and especially its outcome. It speaks volumes that the Union dubbed this the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, while Southerners termed it the Battle of Leesburg. For the Federals, the bluff was the battle.

via My Kingdom for a Map – NYTimes.com.

The Civil War: 1862 (Forever) – The Postal Store @ USPS.com.