In 1971 the Shreveport (Louisiana) Times carried a story about the demolition of the old Webster Parish courthouse in Minden. Inside the cornerstone was a box containing a Confederate flag and a ribbon from a 1905 convention of the United Confederate Veterans of Camp Henry Gray, held in a town identified by the Times as “Timothea.” In fact, there never was such a town, but there the matter rested until last year when Bob G. Burford, a seventh-grade history teacher at Greenacres Junior High School in Bossier City, started working with his students to find a local photograph suitable for inclusion in “Readers’ Album.” They came up with this picture of the tough old veterans—and the flag from the cornerstone—at their convention. Today, the town they met in is as dead as the cause they gathered to celebrate.
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January 2011
Andersonville. It is one of our nation’s blackest memories, a reminder that we, too, once succumbed to ancestral barbarisms, slipping back to a time when men peered out from the mouths of caves and feared the darkness.
It began early in 1864, when General Robert E. Lee ordered that all Union prisoners then held in Richmond be moved out of the beleaguered and badly supplied city. The site chosen for relocation was a piece of land a little over twenty-six acres in size near the hamlet of Andersonville Station, Georgia. It ended early in 1865, when Sherman’s presence in Georgia forced the removal of most of the Andersonville prisoners to such other locations as Charleston, Savannah, Millen, and Florence.
When news that the British had taken Charleston, South Carolina, reached Philadelphia in May of 1780, merchants and government officials reacted to the disaster by taking steps to support the inflated Pennsylvania currency and solicit funds to pay new army recruits. And in a totally unexpected move, the women of Philadelphia emerged from their usual domestic roles to announce their intention of founding the first large-scale women’s association in American history. As the Pennsylvania Gazette put it delicately, the ladies adopted “public spirited measures.” Up until then, American women had not engaged in any organized support of the war effort. Now that the American soldiers were sufring a serious loss of morale in the aftermath of the fall of Charleston, the women proposed a nationwide female-conceived and -executed relief effort to aid the hard-pressed troops. The campaign began June 10, 1780, with the publication of a broadside, The Sentiments of an American Woman .
The first days of July, 1870, found busy river ports along the Mississippi stewing in an unprecedented atmosphere of oppressive, sticky heat and blazing excitement all the way from St. Louis to New Orleans. Roaring upriver under full steam past crowded wharves and levees sped the two most famous steamboats of the day—the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee .
Nothing quite like it had ever been seen before, and it would not happen again.
The 1,200-mile race was more than a contest between spectacular machines for the profitable prestige of being the acknowledged champion of the river. It was the climax of a long and bitter feud between the best-known and most respected river skippers of the era, Thomas P. Leathers and John W. Cannon.
It all began on the evening of July 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy went before television cameras to explain to his countrymen the grave meaning and still graver consequences of the deepening crisis over Berlin. The Russians were threatening American access rights to that isolated city, the President told an audience of 50,000,000 tense and expectant Americans. Those rights might be terminated on December 31 when Premier Khrushchev signed, as he threatened to do, a separate peace treaty with East Germany. If the Russians used force to override our rights, Kennedy warned, they would be met with still greater force: “We do not want to fight but we have fought before.” In consequence, he was calling upon Congress to appropriate $93,000,000 to provide shelter for the population against radioactive fallout.
She began her career as a spy and ended it as an actress, and there are no two professions more thickly larded with myth and lies. At least one historian, despairing of seeing anything real behind the mists, concluded that she had never lived at all. But Belle Boyd did exist and was, in the words of Douglas Southall Freeman, “one of the most active and most reliable of the many secret woman agents of the Confederacy.”