The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith

      Two of Virginia’s most unusual and colorful characters were Captain John Smith and the Native American princess Pocahontas.

     Captain John Smith was an English soldier of fortune who fought his way across Europe in wars being waged by the various rulers in Slovenia, Hungary and Transylvania, earning many awards for bravery.  The Prince of Transylvania awarded Smith with a title and his own coat of arms which displayed the heads of three Turks killed and beheaded by Smith in individual combat.  But Smith’s luck was about to run out.  In 1602 he was wounded in battle and captured by the Turks.  He was sold into slavery and marched six hundred miles to Constantinople.  Here Smith was presented to his new master’s fiancée as a gift.  The woman promptly fell in love with Smith and tried to convert him to Islam.  When this didn’t work, she shipped him off to her brother in Rostov in what was then Turkish occupied Russia.

    The brother beat Smith frequently and put an iron collar around his neck.  John Smith was a man that required a great deal of breaking, and his new master did not succeed.  In fact, Smith killed him and escaped on his horse.  With the help of local Christians, Smith traversed Russia and Ukraine, making his way to Germany, France, and finally England.  After travelling some eleven thousand miles between 1600 -1604, you would think that Smith would be done with long journeys, but his longest journey was just about to begin.

    In April 1606, the Virginia Company was granted a royal charter by King James I to establish a colony.  In December, three ships carrying one hundred and four settlers, including Captain John Smith, set sail for Virginia.  Impressed by Smith’s military record, the Virginia Company had invited Smith to join the enterprise as a member of the new colony’s seven man ruling council. 

   Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, named in honor of King James I, was founded on May 14, 1607.  The early going was tough for the colonists.  The colony suffered from food shortage, disease, and unhealthy drinking water, all in addition to skirmishes with the local Powhatan tribe.  In the autumn of 1607, Captain Smith conducted trips to Powhatan villages to secure much need food.  During one of these forays, Smith was taken prisoner by a large Powhatan hunting party and ultimately brought before Wahunsenacawh, better known to history as Chief Powhatan.

  According to Smith, his head was placed on two stones and as he was held down, a warrior prepared to smash in his skull with a heavy club.  Before the fatal blow fell, however, Chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas rushed to Smith’s side and placed her head on his, preventing the attack. Thus was born the legend of the beautiful princess saving the life of the intrepid English explorer.

  It is easy to understand how Smith, unfamiliar with Powhatan customs thought he was about to be murdered when, in fact, he was being inducted into the tribe.  According to some anthropologists, Smith was undergoing a ritual adoption ceremony, and after the ceremony was treated well and ultimately returned to Jamestown.  As for the Native American princess, her real name was Amonute (she also had the more private name Matoaka). Pocahontas was a nickname which meant “playful one.”  Did she really save John Smith?  Smith only wrote of the incident years later when he was safely back in Europe and there was no one around to contradict his version.  Some have suggested that he took the story of the hero being saved by the beautiful daughter of a powerful lord from an old Scottish ballad.

   Whatever the truth of the rescue story, Pocahontas lived a remarkable life.  While Smith was with the Powhatans he spent time with Pocahontas and they taught each other rudimentary aspects of their different languages.  Pocahontas became an important emissary to the Jamestown colony, negotiating the release of prisoners and occasionally bringing food to the hungry settlers.  Notwithstanding her efforts, relations between the colonists and the Powhatans remained strained.  In 1609, the starving colonists threatened to burn Powhatan villages unless the tribe brought them food.  Chief Powhatan offered to barter for food with Captain John Smith.  Supposedly the chief intended to ambush and kill Smith, but Pocahontas warned Smith of the plot and saved his life (again?).  Smith returned to England after this incident.

   Pocahontas avoided the English until 1613 when she was kidnapped.  The English informed Chief Powhatan that Pocahontas would not be returned unless a food ransom was paid and certain stolen weapons returned.  The ransom was slow in coming and Pocahontas remained a prisoner in the settlement of Henricus where she was under the care of a minister.  Here she learned how to speak English and learned about both Christianity and European culture.  Pocahontas converted to Christianity and took a new name, Rebecca.

   After she had been a prisoner for a year, Sir Thomas Dale, with one hundred and fifty armed men, marched Pocahontas to Chief Powhatan to demand the rest of the ransom.  Along the way a number of villages were burned and a skirmish occurred, but Pocahontas was able to secure peace when she announced to Chief Powhatan that she wished to marry one of the colonists, one John Rolfe, a tobacco planter.  The Chief agreed and on April 5, 1614 the marriage took place, cementing the so-called “Peace of Pocahontas.”

   In 1616, Sir Thomas Dale sailed for England to raise money and to demonstrate that the goal of converting Native Americans to Christianity was being met.  John Rolfe, Pocahontas, their baby son Thomas (born in 1615) and twelve Powhatan tribe members made the trip.  In London, Pocahontas was hailed as a princess and was presented to King James I.  The Virginia Company commissioned a portrait of Pocahontas in European dress.  The painting’s identifying plaque reads, “Matoaka, alias Rebecca, daughter of the most powerful prince of the Powhatan Empire of Virginia.”

   In 1617, Pocahontas and her family set sail for Virginia, but had hardly launched when she was overcome by a grave illness.  The party disembarked at Gravesend, England, where she died.  On her deathbed she said, “All must die. But ‘tis enough that my child liveth.”

Virginia Legends and Lore

The Strange Death of Edgar Allan Poe

 Edgar Allan Poe

   Each spring, the Mystery Writers of America present the Edgar Awards, the most prestigious award a mystery writer can receive.  This award is, fittingly, named after Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the modern detective story (The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Gold Bug).  It is even more fitting that Poe’s untimely death remains one of history’s great unsolved mysteries.

   Poe was born in Boston in 1809 but was orphaned at an early age.  A Richmond couple became his foster parents and Poe spent his youth in Richmond, finally going off to college at the University of Virginia.  Young Poe, now eighteen, incurred gambling debts and quarreled with his foster father. He dropped out of the University of Virginia and joined the United States Army under an assumed name.  This didn’t work out either.  In 1829, Edgar Allan Poe announced that he would make his way in the world by becoming a poet and writer.  Poe became the first American writer to earn a living (a very modest living) through writing alone.

  On September 27, 1849 Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond bound for Philadelphia where he had been commissioned to edit a collection of poems. Poe may never have made it to Philadelphia, and he definitely did not make it to New York to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding.  On October 3, 1849 one Joseph Walker, an employee of the Baltimore Sun, found Poe lying in a Baltimore gutter.  Poe was never to leave Baltimore.  The Poe Museum in Richmond, the repository of many of Poe’s greatest literary works, tells us that the writer was found, “semiconscious and dressed in cheap, ill-fitting clothes so unlike Poe’s usual mode of dress that many believe that Poe’s own clothing had been stolen.”  Edgar Allan Poe remained incoherent, gripped by delirium and hallucinations, unable to explain how he had come to be found in Baltimore,  senseless on the streets, in dirty clothes not his own.  Poe died on the night of October 7, 1849, calling out for “Reynolds”.  The identity of the mysterious Reynolds remains unknown.

   For over one hundred and fifty years people have speculated on the cause of Poe’s death.  Numerous theories have been put forward, including: he died of a beating (1857), he died of epilepsy (1875), he drank himself to death (1921), he died of heart disease (1926), he died of toxic poisoning (1970), he died of hypoglycemia (1979),  he died of diabetes (1977), he died of rabies (1996),  he was murdered (1998).  Other theories proclaim he died of a brain tumor, or from heavy metal poisoning, or from the flu.    

   The most popular theory is that Poe died as a result of a practice called “cooping.”  Cooping was a form of voter fraud practiced in the 19^th century.  Innocent people were snatched off the streets and imprisoned in a room called “the coop”, where they were fed drugs and alcohol, to gain their silence and complicity in a scheme whereby they would vote multiple times in the same election.  The uncooperative would be beaten into submission.  Sometimes they were killed.  Election fraud is a high stakes game.  The now compliant victims were forced to change clothes between casting votes and were often forced to wear wigs and fake beards so that election officials would not recognize them at the polls.

   There is circumstantial evidence that indicates that Poe may have run afoul of such a scheme.  Baltimore elections were notoriously violent and corrupt in 1840.  An election for sheriff was going on at the time.  Poe was found on the street on Election Day near Ryan’s Fourth Ward Polls which was both a bar and a place where votes were cast.  Is it possible that Edgar Allan Poe was kidnapped, drugged and beaten to death in a voter fraud conspiracy?  Perhaps, but the theory still doesn’t explain how Poe got the one hundred miles from Philadelphia to Baltimore.  Surely, it would have been easier for the conspirators to pluck someone off the streets of Baltimore itself.

   Another theory, put forth by writer John E. Walsh in 2000, suggests a more personal reason for Poe’s predicament, one that involved a lady.  Sarah Royster was the teenage sweetheart of Edgar Allan Poe.  Sarah’s father did not approve of Poe and put an end to the relationship while Poe was at the University of Virginia.  Sarah married a very wealthy man named Alexander Shelton and enjoyed a happy marriage until Shelton’s death in 1844.  In 1848, Edgar Allan Poe came back into Sarah’s life.  Sarah attended Poe's lectures in Richmond, and by September 1849 the couple are thought to have had an understanding and were on the verge of marriage.  Once again, Sarah’s family did not approve, perhaps thinking that Poe was a fortune hunter.  John Walsh argues that Poe was in Philadelphia when he was confronted by Sarah’s three brothers who roughly warned him against trying to marry their sister.  A frightened Poe, wanting no further encounters with the brothers, disguised himself (this accounts for the shoddy wardrobe in which Poe was found) and headed back to Richmond to marry Sarah.  The brothers intercepted Poe in Baltimore, savagely beat him, and left him in the gutter.  He subsequently died.  Possible?  Perhaps, but we may never know the truth.

   Edgar Allan Poe was buried in Baltimore.  An imposing grave monument was dedicated to Poe on November 17, 1875.  Beginning in January 1949 and continuing until January 19, 2009 (the two hundredth anniversary of Poe’s birth) a still unidentified stranger entered the cemetery on the night of January 19 and left a partial bottle of cognac and three roses on Poe’s grave. Who was “the Poe Toaster”?  Yet another unsolved mystery.

Virginia Legends and Lore

Henry "Box" Brown's Spectacular Escape from Slavery

One of the most spectacular escapes from slavery made before the American Civil War was that of Henry Brown.  Henry Brown was born into slavery in Louisa County in 1815.  A clever lad, Henry was leased out to a tobacco factory in Richmond at the age of fifteen.  The life of an urban slave was very different than that of a country slave.  With the expansion of the industrial sector in Richmond changes in slave living conditions occurred.  Separate slave housing was common by the 1840s.  Monitoring slave activities would have required constant supervision, and thus was not done.  Urban slave workers took to “losing time” when no one was watching.  This practice was akin to rural “running away” and was a similar form of resistance.  Many owners offered rewards as incentives not to “lose time” and even gave slaves an opportunity to pursue their own entrepreneurial ventures.  Thus, Henry Brown was able to accumulate some money of his own.

 Unfortunately, human greed continued to plague Henry Brown’s existence.  Henry had fallen in love and married a woman named Nancy who lived on a country plantation near the one on which he was born.  The couple had three children.  Nancy’s owner, aware that Henry was making money in Richmond began to extort money from him in order to guarantee the “well being” of Nancy and the children on his plantation.  In 1848, when Nancy was pregnant with the couples fourth child, Henry got the bad news.  Nancy and the children were to be sold to a plantation in North Carolina.  He would never see them again.  With tears in his eyes, Henry watched as three hundred and fifty chained slaves, including his wife and children, walked by him.  “My agony was now complete, she with whom I had traveled the journey of life in chains ... and the dear little pledges God had given us I could see plainly must now be separated from me forever, and I must continue, desolate and alone, to drag my chains through the world,” Henry Brown later wrote.

After months of despair and desolation, Henry Brown hit on a desperate scheme to win his freedom.  Through his faith in God, Brown later said, he was given the inspiration and courage to put together a creative plan of escape.  I conceived of a plan of “of shutting myself up in a box and getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state,” Brown wrote.  Enlisting the help of a free black friend and a white sympathizer, Samuel Smith, Henry Brown set about executing his plan.

Smith contacted James McKim, a white abolitionist and member of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society.  The abolitionists assured Smith that they were ready to receive Henry Brown in Philadelphia.  Smith then procured a box three feet long by two feet eight inches deep by two feet wide, and marked the box as “dry goods.”  The box had only three small air holes.

 On the morning of March 29, 1849, Henry Brown crammed himself into the box carrying only an awl, in case he needed to drill more air holes, and a small flask of water. Brown’s co-conspirators nailed the box shut, marked “This Side Up With Care," and carried the box to the Adams Express Company.  Henry Brown’s journey got off on its rocky way.  Brown traveled by a variety of wagons, railroads, steamboats, and ferries on the way to Philadelphia.  The box was often roughly handled, and at one point the box was turned upside down.  Brown wrote that he, “…was resolved to conquer or die, I felt my eyes swelling as if they would burst from their sockets; and the veins on my temples were dreadfully distended with pressure of blood upon my head.”  At one point, Brown relates, “I felt a cold sweat coming over me that seemed to be warning that death was about to terminate my earthly miseries.”  Fortunately two men needed a place to sit down and, “so perceiving my box, standing on end, one of the men threw it down and the two sat upon it. I was thus relieved from a state of agony which may be more imagined than described.” 

After twenty seven hours, the box arrived at its destination in Philadelphia.  When the box was opened, a very much alive Henry Brown popped out and said to four astonished abolitionists, “How do you do, Gentlemen?”  He then recited a psalm: “I waited patiently on the Lord and He heard my prayer.”  Unable to contain his euphoria, Brown began to sing the psalm, to the delight of the abolitionists, who dubbed him Henry “Box” Brown.

Henry “Box” Brown became a sensation.  He went on tour and thrilled audiences with the story of his daring escape.  In May 1849, he appeared before the New England Anti-Slavery Society Convention in Boston, where he passionately made the case that the enslaved wanted freedom.  He often recited the psalm he uttered when he emerged from his famous box when addressing audiences.  In September 1849, the story of Henry “Box” Brown was published in Boston. Late in 1849 Brown had a moving panorama about slavery made. The panorama consisted of large vertical spools painted with scenes of enslavement and freedom, and was called “Henry Box Brown’s Mirror of Slavery.”

Henry Brown sailed to England in October 1850.  His panorama was exhibited all over England.  At this point, Brown, a natural performer, left the abolitionist circuit and totally embraced show business for the next forty years, performing as an actor, singer and magician in England, the United States, and Canada.  Brown’s last performance took place in Brantford, Ontario, Canada on February 26, 1889.  Henry “Box” Brown died in Toronto on June 15, 1897.

Virginia Legends and Lore

The Suffragist Memorial

 

     The national women’s suffrage movement began in 1848 and had gained a substantial following by 1916.  With the approach of the First World War, many of the activists in the National American Woman Suffrage Association turned to either pacifism or to support for American preparedness.  The more radical National Woman’s Party, created by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns in 1916, continued to focus on winning the vote for women.  Lucy Burns and Alice Paul were activists, suffragists and good friends. Lucy Burns had attended Vassar College and Yale University, and Alice Paul had attended Swarthmore College and earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. The pair was despised by men, and conservative women opposed them. 

     The National Woman’s Party felt betrayed by Woodrow Wilson.  The women believed that Woodrow Wilson had made a commitment to support a suffrage amendment in his campaign for a second Presidential term. When, after his second inauguration in 1917, Wilson did not fulfill this promise, Paul organized picketing of the White House.  This was unprecedented.  Never before had anyone protested in front of the White House.  Some considered the action nothing short of treason.  A woman in New York wrote a letter to the editor calling picketing of the White House, “a menace to the life of the President--a silent invitation to the assassin.”  Undeterred, suffragist demonstrators carried banners quoting Wilson’s own speeches, "We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments."

     On January 9, 1918, President Wilson announced support for a Constitutional Amendment to allow women’s suffrage.  To keep up the pressure, suffragist protestors resumed picketing the White House.  Paul urged men to vote against anti-suffrage Congressmen in the November 1918 elections.  After the election, most re-elected members of Congress were pro-suffrage.  Approved by the House of Representatives and the Senate, and ratified by the requisite thirty six states, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits denying any citizen the right to vote because of that citizen's sex, was ratified on August 18, 1920.

     On May 16, 2021 the “Turning Point Suffragist Memorial” was dedicated to honor the millions of women who worked for more than seven decades to win the vote:

 The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Custer’s Indian Allies

  

The Lakota Sioux were an aggressive and predatory warrior nation.  Since their adoption of the horse in the 1730s, the Sioux had become the Mongols of the American Great Plains…killing and burning…driving smaller and weaker tribes before them.

This was certainly true in the case of the Arikara and Crow tribes.  The Crow once inhabited the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota, but were displaced by the invading Sioux.  The Lakota regarded the former Crow territory as theirs “by right of conquest.” 

The Crow moved farther west to the vicinity of the Little Big Horn River in present day Montana, but the Lakota continued pressing westward into the lands of the Crow, so it is not surprising that the Crow were only too willing to support the U.S. Cavalry against a long time enemy.

In 1866, President Andrew Johnson signed an “Act to increase and fix the Military Peace Establishment of the United States.” This Act had an important impact on the Crow and Arikara tribes who now had a new way of resisting the aggressive Lakota Sioux…they could serve as scouts for the powerful U.S. Cavalry.

The half-Sioux, half-Arikara scout “Bloody Knife” became George Armstrong Custer’s favorite scout.  Custer met Bloody Knife in 1873, and Bloody knife accompanied the Custer expedition in the Yellowstone that year. 

Custer occasionally gave Bloody Knife gifts, including a silver medal inscribed with Bloody Knife's name.  Bloody Knife warned Custer not to attack the overwhelming Indian village the scouts had located during the campaign against the Sioux in 1876, but to no avail. 

On June 25, 1876, Bloody Knife participated in Reno’s charge on the Indian village along the Little Big Horn River.

Bloody Knife was shot through the head, his brains splattering all over Major Marcus Reno, which may have so unhinged Reno that he ordered a disorderly “Charge to the Rear.”

Meanwhile at the other end of the field, the Crow scouts, including White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead, Curly, and Hairy Moccasin, advised Custer to wait for reinforcements.

Custer refused, believing he could whip the entire Sioux nation.  Since the scout's only duties were to find the Indian encampments, not necessarily to fight, Custer sent these Crow scouts away about an hour before engaging in the final battle.

After the battle, Curly found an army supply boat, the Far West, at the confluence of the Bighorn and Little Bighorn Rivers. He was the first to report the Custer’s annihilation, using a combination of sign language, drawings, and an interpreter. Curly did not claim to have fought in the battle, but only to have witnessed it from a distance.

When accounts of “Custer's Last Stand” began to circulate in the press, however, legends grew that Curly had actively participated in the battle, but had managed to escape.  According to one of these legends when Curley saw that the party with Custer was about to be overwhelmed, he begged Custer to let him show him a way to escape.  “…Custer looked at Curly, waved him away and rode back to the little group of men, to die with them.”  Or so goes the story.

Curly died of pneumonia on May 22, 1923 and is buried at the National Cemetery at the Little Bighorn Battlefield. 

Secrets of Confederate Military Prisons

 Confederate military prisons in Richmond became notorious during the Civil War. 

Libby prison was for Union officers.  It was considered second only to Andersonville Prison in Georgia as hell on earth.  Prisoners suffered from disease, malnutrition and a high mortality rate. By 1863, one thousand prisoners were crowded into the prison which had been a warehouse before the war.

According to the Daily Richmond Enquirer of February 2, 1864 “Libby takes in the captured Federals by scores, but lets none out; they are huddled up and jammed into every nook and corner; at the bathing troughs, around the cooking stoves, everywhere there is a wrangling, jostling crowd; at night the floor of every room they occupy in the building is covered, every square inch of it….”

Castle Thunder

A tobacco warehouse before the war, Castle Thunder was converted into a prison to house spies, political prisoners and traitors to the Confederacy.  The prison guards had a reputation for brutality.

On April 10, 1864, Dr. Mary Walker, a female Union surgeon, was taken prisoner by Confederate soldiers and accused of being a spy.  She was imprisoned at Castle Thunder.  Mary Walker spent six months as a prisoner, during which she wrote numerous letters to the press describing the horrible conditions at the prison.  She complained that her mattress was infested with insects, rats ran throughout the prison at night and food rations were meager and inedible. 

Dr. Mary Walker

Later in life Walker complained a guard had fired at her while she stood in the doorway to her cell, just narrowly missing her head.  Both the Confederate and Union armies were desperate for physicians, and on August 12, 1864, Dr. Walker was exchanged for a male physician, a Confederate major.

Belle Isle

Richmond’s Belle Isle, lying in the James River, served as a prison for Union soldiers. The prison housed more than 30,000 prisoners during the course of the war.  Some 1,000 of these prisoners died.  Prisoners were housed in tents surrounded by a stockade.

Belle Isle prison held 10,000 Union soldiers, with tents for only 3,000. With no barracks for the prisoners, exposure to the elements was a large factor contributing to a cruel captivity.

In February 1864, Confederate authorities began to evacuate Belle Isle, sending its inmates south to Andersonville, Georgia; to relieve overcrowding in Richmond. By October 1864, all of Belle Isle’s inmates had been transferred south and the prison was closed. 

Captain Henry Wirz

The Commandant of Belle Isle, Captain Henry Wirz, became the Commandant at Andersonville and was hanged after the war for his treatment of prisoners at Andersonville.

The Commandants of Libby Prison and Castle Thunder fled abroad fearing a similar fate.

Secrets of Manassas Battlefield

 

Video

Wilmer Mclean

The Civil War virtually began in Wilmer Mclean’s kitchen in Manassas on July 18, 1861, when a Union shell dropped into the chimney and exploded in a pot of stew.  Mclean moved his family to central Virginia but he remained in Northern Virginia.  From his experience as a merchant he knew that a long war would cause the price of commodities to rise higher and higher. He began to speculate in sugar and made a tidy income during the war.  Wilmer McLean left northern Virginia in March 1862 and moved to Appomattox Court House,  only to have his house chosen for the surrender of Robert E. Lee in 1865. 

Portici

The Lewis family of  “Portici” found themselves at the center of the First Battle of Manassas. Confederate officers notified the Lewis family that a battle was imminent and that their house would be exposed to fire. They evacuated, taking everything they could with them, but left valuable and heavy furniture behind.  The furniture was stored in a small room in an angle of the house, and the room securely nailed shut.  The only shot that struck the house during the battle struck this room and destroyed all of the furniture.  Furniture was a trifling matter however.  Fannie Lewis was in her ninth month of pregnancy and went into labor as they began to evacuate the house.  Servants found a nearby ravine and dug a small earthen hollow into the bank.  They covered this with greens.  It was here that Fannie Lewis delivered her first baby, John Beauregard Lewis.

Zouave

The Manassas Battlefield, in Prince William County, is also home to a number of Civil War spirits.  During the Second Battle of Manassas, in 1862, the 5th New York Volunteer Infantry [Zouaves] sustained devastating losses.  One of the dead may still haunt the area.  A phantom Zouave soldier has been seen repeatedly on the battlefield’s New York Avenue Field.  The phantom beckons the onlooker to follow him into the woods.  To date, no one has taken the ghost up on the offer.

The Stone House

Near the New York Avenue Field, a structure known as the old Stone House is also said to be haunted. Originally a tavern, the house served as a field hospital during both the battles of First (1861) and Second (1862) Manassas.  Strange lights have been seen in the house at night, although it is locked every night by park rangers.  Strange sounds, like screams and groans are also said to come from the house.

Civil War ghosts, real or imagined?  Investigate more deeply, if you dare.

Virginia Legends and Lore

Captain James Gordon: The Real Horatio Hornblower

 

Sir James Gordon

British forces routed American troops at the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24, 1814 and marched into Washington City.  The British commander reported to London, “I reached [Washington] at 8 o’clock that night. Judging it of consequences to complete the destruction of the public buildings with the least possible delay, so that the army might retire without loss of time, the following buildings were set fire to and consumed: the capitol, including the Senate house and House of representation, the Arsenal, the Dock-Yard, Treasury, War office, President’s Palace, Rope-Walk, and the great bridge across the Potomac: In the dock-yard a frigate nearly ready to be launched, and a sloop of war, were consumed.”

While Washington still smoldered, seven British warships under the command of Captain James Gordon (thought by some to be the inspiration for C.S. Forester’s fictional hero Horatio Hornblower) appeared on the Potomac River headed for the Alexandria, just south of the city.  On the morning of August 28, 1814, a committee led by Alexandria Mayor Charles Simms rowed south to meet the British and request terms of surrender. Gordon and his fleet arrived in front of Alexandria in the evening. The next morning, the British lined up their gun boats with cannons bristling at the ready.

At the mercy of the British squadron, the town council agreed to the enemy's demands, and for the next five days the British looted stores and warehouses of barrels of flour, hogsheads of tobacco, bales of cotton, along with wine, sugar and other items.

While the British confiscated goods in Alexandria, American forces were setting up a battery on the river at White House Landing below Mount Vernon. On September 1, Captain Gordon sent two of his ships to fire on the battery to impede its completion, but by evening the Americans had five naval long guns and eight artillery field pieces in place.  On September 6, the entire squadron engaged the battery destroying all thirteen American guns within forty five minutes.  All seven British warships and twenty one captured merchant vessels returned to the main fleet.

Warsand Invasions (Four alternative history stories)

General George S. Patton once said, “Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.” Here are four stories about the history of the world IF wars we know about happened differently or IF wars that never happened actually took place.

The Real Sergeant York

 

Sergeant Alvin C. York was one of the most decorated American soldiers of World War I.  He received the Medal of Honor for leading an attack if a German machine gun nest, capturing 35 machine guns and 132 enemy soldiers.

American DomesticPropaganda in World War I

A brief look at the changing historical views (1920 to the present) on the uses and abuses of American domestic propaganda during World War I. Was this a necessary evil or a gross infringement of civil liberties? How, when, and why has opinion changed?

Union Hospital Ships in the Civil War

During the Civil War, the Union outfitted hospital ships to care for the wounded.  The Hospital Transport System was run by the United States Sanitary Commission.  Large steamers were outfitted as hospital vessels. The ships had beds, medical supplies, surgeons, nurses, ward-masters, apothecaries, and other personnel, and were all provided without cost to the government.  A contemporary account describes the scene:

 “Imagine an immense river-steamboat filled on every deck: every berth, every square inch of room, covered with wounded men, even the stairs and gangways and guards filled with those who were less badly wounded; and then imagine fifty well men, on every kind of errand, hurried and impatient, rushing to and fro, every touch bringing agony to the poor fellows, whilst stretcher after stretcher comes along, hoping to find an empty place; and then imagine what it was for these people of the Commission to keep calm themselves, and make sure that each man, on such a boat as that, was properly refreshed and fed. Sometimes two or even three such boats were lying side by side, full of suffering and horrors.”

    The Great Northern Rebellion of 1860 (alternate history)

In 1860, disgruntled secessionists in the deep North rebel against the central government and plunge America into Civil War.

                  On Amazon 

 

Women Doctors and the Union Army

 Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell

     In the mid-nineteenth century, sex discrimination prevented women from pursuing medicine, and those few who did were often obstructed by their male colleagues.  The University of Pennsylvania, established the first medical school in the country, and set the pattern of barring women from obtaining medical degrees.  It was not until January 23, 1849 that Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to receive a medical degree in America.

     Blackwell received her medical degree despite the odds.  She started her quest in 1847, applying to every medical school of which she knew, and was rejected by all nineteen schools.  In the end a small school in upstate New York, Geneva Medical College, accepted Blackwell.  The male students thought her admission a hilarious joke, but later learned to respect her brains and talent. Blackwell later wrote,

 

“I had not the slightest idea of the commotion created by my appearance as a medical student in the little town. Very slowly I perceived that a doctor's wife at the table avoided any communication with me, and that as I walked backwards and forwards to college the ladies stopped to stare at me, as at a curious animal. I afterwards found that I had so shocked Geneva propriety that the theory was fully established either that I was a bad woman, whose designs would gradually become evident, or that, being insane, an outbreak of insanity would soon be apparent. Feeling the unfriendliness of the people, though quite unaware of all this gossip, I never walked abroad, but hastening daily to my college as to a sure refuge, I knew when I shut the great doors behind me that I shut out all unkindly criticism, and I soon felt perfectly at home amongst my fellow students...”

 

     Elizabeth Blackwell graduated first in her class.  Blackwell’s sister, Emily, soon followed her older sister into the field of medicine.  She faced the same obstacles that her sister had faced.  Emily Blackwell’s applications for admission were rejected by twelve medical schools, including Geneva Medical College, her sister's alma mater, which had re-thought the whole notion of women doctors.  Emily Blackwell was eventually accepted at the Western Reserve University medical school in Cleveland, Ohio, where she earned her medical degree in 1854, becoming the third woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.  The obstacles encountered by the Blackwell sisters were common for women seeking a medical education in the decades prior to the Civil War. 

     When the Civil War broke out, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell helped organize the Women’s Central Association of Relief in New York City, which collected and distributed life-saving food and medical supplies.  Blackwell also joined with several other physicians in New York City to offer a training course for 100 women who wanted to be nurses for the army. This was the first formal training for women nurses ever to have been offered in America.

     In 1861 there were only some 250 women doctors in the entire United States.  Some of these pioneering women would serve in the war directly supporting the Union army.

American Civil War Medicine 1861-1865

 Of the approximately 600,000 soldiers who died in the American Civil, fully two-thirds died from disease.  It is estimated that some 300,000 men died from sickness caused by intestinal disorders alone, mainly typhoid fever, diarrhea, and dysentery.  The fault lay with the shocking filth of the army camps themselves.  A Federal inspector reported in late 1861 that Union camps were, “ littered with refuse, food, and other rubbish, sometimes in an offensive state of decomposition; slops deposited in pits within the camp limits or thrown out of broadcast; heaps of manure and offal close to the camp.” Confederate camps were no better.  Bacteria and viruses spread through the camps.  Typhoid fever, caused by the consumption of food or water contaminated by salmonella bacteria was devastating.  Poor diet and exposure to the elements often developed into pneumonia, which was the third great killing disease of the war, after typhoid and dysentery.  Tuberculosis was a common disease among the troops.  Camps populated by soldiers from small rural areas, who lacked immunity to common contagious diseases, were stricken by outbreaks of measles, chickenpox, and mumps. Additionally, epidemics of malaria spread through camps located near swamps.

 Approximately 110,000 Union and 94,000 Confederate soldiers died of battle wounds.  Most of the wounded were treated within the first forty eight hours.  Emergency medical care on the battlefield consisted of bandaging a soldier’s wounds as fast possible, and giving him whiskey and morphine, if necessary, for pain. Primary care took place in field hospitals.  Those who survived were then transported in overcrowded ambulance wagons to rail lines where they were put on box cars and rushed to nearby cities and towns, where doctors and nurses did their best to care for them in makeshift hospitals.

The most common battlefield operation was the amputation of arms and legs.  Amputation was a quick and reliable answer to the severe wounds created by the .58 caliber Minie ball used during the war.  This heavy bullet of soft lead caused large gaping wounds that filled with dirt and pieces of clothing.  It shattered bone.  Surgeons usually chose amputation over trying to save the limb.  Heavy doses of chloroform were administered and some seventy five percent of all soldiers survived the operation.  The poet Walt Whitman, who served as a nurse in the Union army at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, recounted seeing, “a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc, a full load for a one-horse cart.”

 When the Civil War began, the Federal army had 98 medical officers, and the Confederate army had 24 medical officers. By the end of the war in 1865, some 13,000 Union doctors had served in the field and in the army hospitals; in the Confederacy, about 4,000 medical officers treated war casualties.

Exchange Hotel and Civil War Hospital: Gordonsville, Virginia

Civil War Humor 1861-1865

Despite the horrors of war, or maybe because of them, humor still had a place in American life. Abraham Lincoln best summed up the role of humor in the war when he said, “With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.”

A brief but fascinating look at humor in the Civil War including: (1) Stories Around the Campfire, (2) Parody, (3) the Irish, (4) Humorous Incidents, (5) Civil War Humorists, and (6) Lincoln.