An article in the NY Times by Martin Griffin, associate professor of American literature at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of “Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865-1900.” An excerpt …
“The train that brought Abraham Lincoln’s body back to Springfield, Ill., took almost two weeks to complete its journey, making a long, northeasterly loop through Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Indiana. The last stretch, from Chicago to Springfield, was completed on the morning of May 3, 1865.
“The journey was widely covered in the press as millions of Americans turned out to pay their last respects. Generations of historians have described, and tried to interpret the meaning of, this unique funeral procession. But no author has probed the event more deeply than Walt Whitman.”
An article in the NY Times by Joshua Zeitz, author of “Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln s Image.” An excerpt …
“Today Americans almost universally regard Abraham Lincoln as our greatest president. And yet he was not always the revered figure that he has become.
“Writing many decades after Lincoln’s assassination, John Hay, who served as one of Lincoln’s secretaries, observed that if the president had ‘died in the days of doubt and gloom which preceded his re-election,’ rather than in the final weeks of the Civil War, he would almost certainly have been remembered differently, despite his great acts and deeds. Indeed, just months before his death, many leading members of his own political party agreed with Gov. John Andrew of Massachusetts, who found Lincoln “essentially lacking in the quality of leadership.”
An article in the NY Times by Evan Fleischer. An excerpt …
“In 1915, 50 years after Appomattox, the London Branch of Civil War Veterans counted 115 members. The list can be found in Harvard’s Houghton Library, and it provides the names, addresses, ages and length and general location of the service of all its members. One man, listed only as E. Munro, was reported as being 105 years old. Presumably, there were many other veterans who made their way to Britain after the war, who had either died by 1915 or had never bothered to join the branch.”
An article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch by Joe Holleman about a blog post by St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay asking whether a memorial to Confederate soldiers in Forest Park should be removed.
A similar article in the Kansas City Star by Jim Suhr of the Associated Press about a blog post by St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay asking whether a memorial to Confederate soldiers in Forest Park should be removed.
Missouri 150 Years Ago
Every week, Len Eagleburger (co-edited by Beverly Shaw) edits a newsletter called “Ozarks Civil War Sesquicentennial Weekly.” One of its sections is entitled “Missouri 150 Years Ago.” These are the links to articles which appeared in the Columbia Daily Tribune newspaper published in Columbia, Missouri.
