Abner Doubleday Journal
Capt. Abner Doubleday, the 41-year-old second in command at Fort Sumter, fired the first shot in defense of the fort. He would go on to serve as the acting corps commander on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg after the death of Gen. John Reynolds.
The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush
By Howard Blum
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
New York Times
Civil War Chronicles, the American Heritage column that’s devoted to this nation’s greatest conflict, has expanded and taken new shape in the following pages. The idea for the department began two years ago with a simple premise: give readers an idea of how events unfolded in the lead-up to the Civil War by documenting events that occurred 150 years ago during the exact months in which that issue of American Heritage was published. Letters told us how much our readers enjoyed the department.
In these letters, we encounter 18-year-old Elizabeth “Bess” Corey, a plucky school teacher in rural Tennant, Iowa, at the turn of the 20th century. Her homespun epistles, redolent with frontier eloquence and rife with misspellings, speak of homesickness and the joys and challenges of teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. “Yes I’d give a ‘lick’ at my piece of candy to be home long enough to can 60 qts of pieplant,” she ends one note to her mother.
Her irrepressible optimism burns steadily and brightly, even as she writes about nearly freezing to death on her way home during a snowstorm. Her enthusiastic, gossipy letter writing gives us an unusual look into rural America at about the same time that the Wright brothers were introducing their world-shattering invention.
One hundred and fifty years after the guns began shelling Fort Sumter this April, Americans remain fascinated with the Civil War. Why do we care about a war that ended so long ago?
Part of the answer lies in the continental scope of a conflict fought not on some foreign land but on battlefields ranging from Pennsylvania to New Mexico and from Florida to Kansas, hallowed ground that Americans can visit today. The near-mythical figures who have come to represent the war intrigue us still: Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, William T. Sherman and Nathan Bedford Forrest, Clara Barton and Belle Boyd. Most important, the sheer drama of the story, the momentous issues at stake, and the tragic, awe-inspiring human cost of the conflict still resonate. More than 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers gave their last full measure of devotion in the war, nearly as many as the number of American soldiers killed in all the other wars this country has fought—combined. Americans in both North and South were willing to fight on, despite such horrific casualties because their respective nations and societies were at stake.
One warm summer night in 1881, a scrawny, nervous man sat in his boarding house a few blocks from the White House. Outside his window, gaslights flickered and horses clopped over cobblestones, but Charles Guiteau barely noticed. For six weeks now, a divine inspiration had festered in his fevered brain. The president, God told Guiteau, had to be “removed.”
Since early June, the lunatic had stalked the president with gun in hand. Enraged at James Garfield for fracturing the Republican Party, convinced that the split would precipitate a second civil war, Guiteau pursued his prey with single-minded calculation. One Sunday he aimed at Garfield through a church window; the following Saturday he crouched in a train depot as the president walked past, but spared him out of pity for the ailing wife clinging to her husband’s arm. A few mornings later, the little man waited along the Potomac, where the president often rode. No horse passed. Now Guiteau could wait no longer, and he began a letter to be delivered the next day:
To Gen. Sherman:
Nothing in his childhood in Gloucestershire’s quiet parish of Down Hatherley had prepared 43-year-old Button Gwinnett of Georgia for the fierce politics that he encountered after signing the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776. One rivalry would turn so bitter that it would cut short his promising career. Violence, sometimes lethal, was an integral part of the fabric of the early American political discourse.