Civil War scholar Harold Holzer helps to decode what spectators heard when the 16th president spoke.
“Lincoln’s voice, as far as period descriptions go, was a little shriller, a little high,” says Holzer [leading Lincoln scholar]. It would be a mistake to say that his voice was squeaky though…”
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Hundreds of women served as spies during the Civil War. Here’s a look at six who risked their lives in daring and unexpected ways.
One of the most famous Confederate spies, Belle Boyd was born to a prominent slaveholding family near Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), in 1843. At the age of 17, she was arrested for shooting a Union soldier who had broken into her family’s home and insulted her mother.
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In 1865, a single photograph was taken during the autopsy of John Wilkes Booth. Where is it now?
The administration, led by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, ordered that a single photograph be taken of Booth’s corpse, says Bob Zeller, president of the Center for Civil War Photography. On April 27, 1865, many experts agree, famed Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner and his assistant Timothy O’Sullivan Took the picture.
It hasn’t been seen since, and its whereabouts are unknown.
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A member of the Richmond elite, one woman defied convention and the Confederacy and fed secrets to the Union during the Civil War.
One of the most effective was Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew—a prominent member of Richmond, Virginia, society. The 43-year-old lived with her widowed mother in a three-story mansion in the Confederate capital, but she fervently opposed slavery and secession, writing her thoughts in a secret diary she kept buried in her backyard and whose existence she would reveal only on her deathbed.
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Among the many officers who fought in the U.S. Civil War, who wore their beard, mustache, mutton chops or sideburns the best?
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Take a look back at how Americans have remembered the civil war during significant anniversaries of the past.
By the time of the 25th anniversary of the war, the veterans of blue and gray were beginning the long process of reconciliation. In 1886, survivors of Confederate Maj. George E. Pickett’s division were welcomed to a reunion at Gettysburg with Union veterans of the battle from Philadelphia.
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These six histories of the Civil War that are must-reads if you want to better understand the conflict.
The literature on the war is so vast you could spend a lifetime reading really good books about it. Here are five excellent ones:
Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), by James McPherson: Widely regarded as the most authoritative one-volume history of the war.
The Fiery Trial (2010), by Eric Foner: A new Pulitzer-Prize-winning and authoritative account of President Abraham Lincoln’s navigation through the politics of abolition; it won the Pulitzer Prize for History.
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The Library of Congress has published a special collection of 3D photographs commemorating the Civil War.
Hundreds of women concealed their identities so they could battle alongside their Union and Confederate counterparts.
I think by all accounts, the women seemed honestly to want to fight in the war for the same reasons as men, so that would range from patriotism, to supporting their respective causes, for adventure, to be able to leave home, and to earn money. Some of the personal writings that survive show that they were also running away from family lives that were really unsatisfying. You can imagine that perhaps they felt trapped at home or weren’t able to marry and felt that they were financial burdens to their families. If you profile the substantiated cases of these women, they were young and often poor and from farming families, and that is the exact profile of the typical male volunteer. - Bonnie Tsui, author of She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers in the Civil War.
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