This Week in History, Apr 9 – Apr 15
- Apr 09, 1865
- Robert E. Lee surrenders
- Apr 10, 1866
- ASPCA is founded
- Apr 11, 1814
- Napoleon exiled to Elba
- Apr 12, 1861
- The Civil War begins
- Apr 13, 1997
- Tiger Woods wins first major
- Apr 14, 1865
- Lincoln is shot
- Apr 15, 1947
- Jackie Robinson breaks color barrier
- What stands out to you? Did you have to research any? Please post your thoughts.
- Ms. Wrobel’s Comment of the Week: I see a theme with three events from the week. Seventh grade, did you have a guess? The Civil War. It is so close I can already see the haversacks! Here is some Civil War Trivia to help us make it for two more weeks until the Civil War Unit.
- Facts about the Civil War
• More than three million men fought in the war.
• Two percent of the population—more than 620,000—died in it.
• In two days at Shiloh on the banks of the Tennessee River, more Americans fell than in all previous American wars combined.
• During the Battle of Antietam, 12,401 Union men were killed, missing or wounded; double the casualties of D-Day, 82 years later. With a total of 23,000 casualties on both sides, it was the bloodiest single day of the Civil War.
• At Cold Harbor, Va., 7,000 Americans fell in 20 minutes.
• Senator John J. Crittendon of Kentucky had two sons who became major generals during the Civil War: one for the North, one for the South.
• Ulysses S. Grant was not fond of ceremonies or military music. He said he could only recognize two tunes. “One was Yankee Doodle,” he grumbled. “The other one wasn’t.”
• Missouri sent 39 regiments to fight in the siege of Vicksburg: 17 to the Confederacy and 22 to the Union.
• During the Battle of Antietam, Clara Barton tended the wounded so close to the fighting that a bullet went through her sleeve and killed a man she was treating.
• At the start of the war, the value of all manufactured goods produced in all the Confederate states added up to less than one-fourth of those produced in New York State alone.
• In March 1862, European powers watched in worried fascination as the Monitor and Merrimack battled off Hampton Roads, Va. From then on, after these ironclads opened fire, every other navy on earth was obsolete.
• In 1862, the U.S. Congress authorized the first paper currency, called “greenbacks.”
• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., future chief Justice, was wounded three times during the Civil War: in the chest at Ball’s Bluff, in the back at Antietam and in the heel at Chancellorsville.
• Confederate Private Henry Stanley fought for the Sixth Arkansas, and was captured at Shiloh, but survived to go to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone.
• George Pickett’s doomed infantry charge at Gettysburg was the first time he took his division into combat.
• On July 4, 1863, after 48 days of siege, Confederate General John C. Pemberton surrendered the city of Vicksburg to the Union’s General, Ulysses S. Grant. The Fourth of July was not be celebrated in Vicksburg for another 81 years.
• Disease was the chief killer during the war, taking two men for every one who died of battle wounds.
• North and South, potential recruits were offered awards, or “bounties,” for enlisting, as much as $677 in New York. Bounty jumping soon became a profession, as men signed up, then deserted, to enlist again elsewhere. One man repeated the process 32 times before being caught.
• African Americans constituted less than one percent of the northern population, yet by the war’s end made up ten percent of the Union Army. A total of 180,000 black men, more than 85% of those eligible, enlisted.
• In November 1863, President Lincoln was invited to offer a “few appropriate remarks” at the opening of a new Union cemetery at Gettysburg. The main speaker, a celebrated orator from Massachusetts, spoke for nearly two hours. Lincoln offered just 269 words in his Gettysburg Address.
• Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest had 30 horses shot from under him and personally killed 31 men in hand-to-hand combat. “I was a horse ahead at the end,” he said.
• The words “In God We Trust” first appeared on a U.S. coin in 1864.
• In 1864, Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to Lieutenant General, a rank previously held by General George Washington, and led the 533,000 men of the Union Army, the largest in the world. Three years later, he was made President of the United States.
• Andersonville Prison in southwest Georgia held 33,000 prisoners in 1864. It was the fifth largest city in the Confederacy.
•By the end of the war, Unionists from every state except South Carolina had sent regiments to fight for the North.
• On November 9, 1863, President Lincoln attended a theater in Washington, D.C., to see “The Marble Heart.” An accomplished actor, John Wilkes Booth, was in the cast.
• On March 4, 1865, Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term. Yards away in the crowd was John Wilkes Booth with a pistol in his pocket. His vantage point on the balcony, he said later, offered him “an excellent chance to kill the President, if I had wished.”
• On May 13, 1865, a month after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana became the last man killed in the Civil War, in a battle at Palmito Ranch, Texas. The final skirmish was a Confederate victory.
• Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black man ever elected to the U.S. Senate. He filled the seat last held by Jefferson Davis.
