Beverly native celebrates a very special birthday
By Stephen P. Hall
Wed Feb 20, 2008
One other amazing discovery occurred as I searched back further into her family tree. I discovered that her father George lied about his age and joined the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry when he was about 15 years old in July of 1864, and later transferred to the 55th Regiment, and served during the last two years of the American Civil War. The enlistment papers indicate his stature at slight, at 5 foot, 5 inches tall. So add “surviving daughter of a Civil War soldier” to Florence’s list of amazing statistics and you can see we have a very special former Beverly resident celebrating her birthday later this month. I checked on the Internet and according to Veteran’s affairs there are only three children of Civil War veterans collecting VA benefits.
to read all the things that pique one's interest, the editors of The Atlantic.com have opened the flood gates on a treasure trove of reading material from the magazine's archives. This is very exciting, and will cause me no end of trouble (thanks to friend Luke for tipping me off).COLFAX RIOT
On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which
three white men and 150 negroes were slain.
This event on April 13, 1873 marked the end of
carpetbag misrule in the South.
Erected by the Louisiana Department of Commerce and Industry 1950
I’m guessing 17 days was long enough for regular visitors to grok my last entry, the cartoon I posted in the first week of this month? I’m back in the saddle now, and bursting at the seams with fresh, 2008ish content for the blog. Thanks for your patience.At that time (July, 1847), what is now called San Francisco was called Yerba Buena. A naval officer, Lieutenant Washington A. Bartlett, its first alcalde, had caused it to be surveyed and laid out into blocks and lots, which were being sold at sixteen dollars a lot of fifty varas square; the understanding being that no single person could purchase of the alcalde more than one in-lot of fifty varas, and one out-lot of a hundred varas. Folsom, however, had got his clerks, orderlies, etc., to buy lots, and they, for a small consideration, conveyed them to him, so that he was nominally the owner of a good many lots. Lieutenant Halleck had bought one of each kind, and so had Warner. Many naval officers had also invested, and Captain Folsom advised me to buy some, but I felt actually insulted that he should think me such a fool as to pay money for property in such a horrid place as Yerba Buena, especially ridiculing his quarter of the city, then called Happy Valley. At that day Montgomery Street was, as now, the business street, extending from Jackson to Sacramento, the water of the bay leaving barely room for a few houses on its east side, and the public warehouses were on a sandy beach about where the Bank of California now stands, viz., near the intersection of Sansome and California, Streets. Along Montgomery Street were the stores of Howard & Mellus, Frank Ward, Sherman & Ruckel, Ross & Co., and it may be one or two others. Around the Plaza were a few houses, among them the City Hotel and the Custom-House, single-story adobes with tiled roofs, and they were by far the most substantial and best houses in the place. The population was estimated at about four hundred, of whom Kanakas (natives of the Sandwich Islands) formed the bulk.
I have enlisted three after dinner speakers (Thurs., Fri., Sat.): Dr. Steven Woodworth of TCU, Dr. John Fowler of Kennesaw State, and Atlanta historian Steve Davis. All of that—3 dinner talks, 2 full days of touring (lunch included), and two half-days of touring runs $250 a person. It’s cheap because we aim to get as close to break-even as possible, with anything left over donated to The Civil War Trust, or a local group. Every year about 2/3rds of the attendees are people who have attended all or several of the 12 meetings, and the rest are first-timers and veterans of the last few outings. We come from all over the country, and some from other countries (Canada and the U.K. regularly represented). Besides this notice, I’ll make an announcement in some other online venues until the bus fills up. Alert and faithful readers of this blog will have the first shot at those 8 seats.And not merely racist incitement. So slack is our grasp of history and principle that we seem unable to think of the Confederacy as other than "offensive" to blacks. But there are two Republican candidates in this election—the absurd and sinister Ron Paul being the other—who choose this crucial moment in our time to exalt those who attempted to destroy the Union by force, and those who solicited the help of foreign powers in order to do so, and whose treason led to the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Should their patriotism be questioned? I would say most definitely yes, and questioned repeatedly, at that, perhaps especially if they are seeking the nomination of the party of Lincoln.
There were two key, tightly-connected, questions: is that flag racist? Readers went for it here. And, was the Civil War was actually about slavery or not? Battle lines drawn here. Nobody seemed to change anyone else's mind, and it wasn't all that civil. Richmond says "We're beyond the point of asking 'What would Gen. Lee do?' partly because we know the answer ('Surrender and tell the troops to go home.') and partly because he's dead."
Most of my life, when people ask me where I’m from, I have always said Iowa, because that’s where I spent my formative years, sixth grade through high school graduation, and because it is the state where my parents grew up. At this point, usually, the inquisitive person will say something about potatoes, to which all Iowans reflexively (and politely) say, no, I think that's Idaho.
I am from the North and the South, but view them both as an outsider would, blowing in from the west. I am sort of ashamed to say that, in my seven years in Denison, I never noticed (or can't remember noticing) the Civil War monument on the courthouse lawn [I stole this picture from my friend Mark Knowles’ web site – I’ll try to remember to ask for permission later]. Must have driven by it a thousand times.
Some survived the war, but not the peace. Emerson Opdycke, at left, overcame a grievous wound at Shiloh—and was in the thick of things throughout the war—but mortally wounded himself many years later in an unfortunate accident.
drowned, or who suffered some other fatal accident. I excluded murders, drownings, and accidents that occurred between April of 1861 and April of 1865, since war certainly made all of those things somewhat more likely. I'm sure I missed a few entries in the Eicher book in which the search terms were not present (though the authors are consistent with the phrasing, for the most part). 
There’s something about Civil War veterans who go on to make their mark as explorers that really piques my interest. Two that have been the subject of modern biographies are worthy of mention here. I’m readying a more detailed post on John Wesley Powell, about whom much has been written, he who lost an arm at Shiloh, and who went on to navigate the Colorado River.In 1861, when he was living in Arkansas, Stanley felt obliged to enlist in the Confederate Army because someone had sent him a petticoat, implying he was a coward. Captured the following year at the Battle of Shiloh, he was taken to Chicago to a federal prison camp and subsequently released on condition that he join the Union Army. But while stationed with the artillery in West Virginia, he was prostrated by dysentery and left in the local hospital when his regiment moved on. Although he later claimed he had been discharged, he had actually been told to rejoin his unit when his health improved. His refusal to do so thus turned him into a deserter.
On his return to America in 1867, Henry Stanley finally discovered what he was good at: describing battles and other adventures in the newspapers. During a year in which he reported for the Missouri Democrat on expeditions against the Cheyenne and on negotiations between the Plains Indians and the government, Stanley got to know Wild Bill Hickok, Colonel George A. Custer, and General William Tecumseh Sherman, who later told him that his journey to Livingstone was a greater feat than his own "March to the Sea." His success as a journalist convinced James Gordon Bennett Jr., the proprietor of the New York Herald, to hire him to cover a British expedition to Abyssinia, to write about the 1868 revolution in Spain, and, more famously, to "FIND LIVINGSTONE," an injunction that, as Jeal points out, was much dramatized in Stanley's account of the negotiations.
Adult readers of history have to unlearn many of the things they remember from their schooldays. This is especially true of quotations of famous people because before the invention of tape recording virtually anything they said from the Old Testament onward was almost certain to be misquoted unless they wrote it down themselves.
The correction of misquotations is often a relief. It is good to learn that the Duke of Wellington could not have made the foolish remark that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton": apart from the absence of evidence, the school's fields were not used for organized sports when he was a schoolboy in the 1780s, and in any case he never played on them. But sometimes it is sad to find that well-remembered sayings—pithy, pungent, and redolent of the speaker—were never uttered, that Oliver Cromwell did not dismiss the Rump Parliament with the words "Take away these baubles," that he never told the painter Peter Lely to depict him "warts and all." These are the historical equivalents to learning that Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson," or that Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca does not say "Play it again, Sam."
Now comes an even greater shock. In his impressive, revealing, and well-written biography of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, Tim Jeal argues that the most famous greeting in history was never delivered. As a child I saw an engraving of the meeting between Stanley and David Livingstone above the caption "Dr Livingstone, I presume." I loved both the greeting and the picture of the two strangers, surrounded by Arabs and Africans, solemnly doffing their hats on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. More impressed than I am now by the virtues of being laconic, hlegmatic, and English, I admired the formality and sangfroid of men who, after long and hazardous journeys, had finally met in "darkest" Africa. The later discovery that Stanley was a Welshman pretending to be an American, and that he had prepared a greeting in the style of an English gentleman, added pathos as well as absurdity. So did the knowledge that the greeting swiftly became a joke in London's music halls.
Yet according to Jeal, nothing memorable was actually said, and Stanley invented the words afterward when he wanted to infuse the occasion with a striking phrase. Thus he was forced to cut out the pages in his diary that described the encounter. But he could not censor Livingstone's letters, which record the meeting in detail to various correspondents, and do not mention any such greeting. One of the many ironies of Stanley's life is that he is remembered more for a remark he did not make than for his career as the greatest explorer of the nineteenth century.
Below is a Lincoln photomosaic using contact prints or just very small Civil War photographs. I bought a copy of this in the gift shop at the Library of Congress many years ago—I imagine they still sell it. It's a pretty remarkable effect. Click on it for a larger view—you may be surprised at how many of these miniature images are instantly familiar.
Another neat idea, this one made available free from the folks at Civil War Traveler magazine: podcasts of walking tours, recorded on the battlefield, narrated by National Park Service historians—with accompanying pdf maps you can print out. Ahhh, sweet, sweet technology.
First, there was the world premiere of the opera Appomattox in San Francisco (see my review here). Now, as if to poke a finger in the other eye of conservative, California-phobic Civil War buffs, the musical "Atlanta" is opening in Los Angeles. 
Readers of the last blog entry here may have noted that the controversy over the Alacatraz photographs really took off in early August of 1864, and that by August 5th, Department of the Pacific commander Irvin McDowell was assuring the War Department that the situation was under control (the prints and negatives seized, and the customers' names obtained). In subsequent correspondence, he was compelled to defend the honor of Capt. Winder, whose loyalty had been called into question. 
Ouch. "Unofficially," Grant says, McDowell is a disaster waiting to happen. He is not a good military commander, nor is he suited to deal with civilian authorities. He will do more harm than good. I'm struck by the seemingly casual tone of Grant's recommendation that McDowell be summarily dismissed or demoted from department command. The Secretary of War, to his credit, replies with a solid defense of General McDowell. 
Nicely done. Stanton lays it all out: 1) there have been no complaints about him (unlike his predecessor), 2) he works well with the governor, 3) he's a good administrator, and 4) he's scrupulously honest. Yet he defers to Grant on the matter.
At last, to Grant's credit, he backs off the recommendation, reiterating that his poor impressions were based on unofficial sources— indeed, based only on something he'd heard [from one or more McDowell detractors]. Good thing, too. From all I can learn, McDowell was an able department head, was a well liked and effective administrator, and the civilian authorities Grant was concerned about were well pleased with his service. His post-war army career took him around the country, but he returned to the West Coast to command the Division of the Pacific before his retirement in 1882. He is regarded highly in San Francisco, where his service as a park commissioner was instrumental in the development of Golden Gate Park, one of the nation's great urban green spaces (photo below: Google Maps).
