President Lincoln addresses the State of the Union and grows impatient with General McClellan.
The month saw few battles, with no decisive advantage gained. A skirmish on Buffalo Mountain in western Virginia was typical. Union troops attacked a Confederate camp but withdrew after a morning’s fight—137 Union casualties, 146 Confederate.
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As Union generals came and left, personalities clashed and Southern farmers set fire to their fields.
On November 1, George B. McClellan assumed the role of general in chief of the Union armies, a post voluntarily vacated by the ailing 75-year-old Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, who had been a target of McClellan’s barbs in the press. The promotion inflated McClellan’s already significant ego, and he would spar with Lincoln throughout the war.
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The story of how Thaddeus Lowe reinvented reconnaissance at the encouragement of President Lincoln.
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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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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The first Union officer killed in the Civil War was a friend of President Lincoln’s.
Ellsworth was a man with large military ambitions, but his meteoric fame came in a way he could not have hoped for: posthumously. At the age of 24, as commander of the 11th New York Volunteers, also known as the First Fire Zouaves, Ellsworth became the first Union officer killed in the war.
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“In February, 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln traveled from Springfield to Washington, visiting his supporters and finding his voice on his way to taking the oath of office on March 4.”
“A Young war-horse helped Phil Sheridan win the day in the Shenandoah Valley and, made famous by a poem, helped Abraham Lincoln win re-election.”
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To His Excellency President Lincoln, Washington, D.C.:
I beg to present you as a Christmas-gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.
W.T. Sherman
Major-General
