Browse Items (26 total)

Civil War legal codes define desertion as the deliberate abandonment of one’s military duty with the intention to remain absent. The earliest estimate of Confederate desertion comes from December 1862, when the fledgling army found several thousand…

From 1830 to 1850, American settlers migrating westward dramatically increased the white population of Minnesota. By the late 1850s, the United States government had routinely violated the treaties it made with the Dakotas (also called the "Sioux" by…

The July 4, 1863 issue of Harper's Weekly featured three illustrations of Gordon, an escaped Mississippi plantation slave who sought refuge with the Union army. Harper’s staff based their illustration upon a photograph taken in Baton Rouge in April…

The artist responsible for this cartoon is unknown, but the sketch reflects the widely held belief that President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was wearing women’s clothing when apprehended by Union troops. General Robert E. Lee, the commander…

William D. Washington’s renowned painting, The Burial of Latané (1864), poignantly captured a Confederate memory of the Civil War. The painting depicts the funeral of Confederate Captain William Latané who led Confederate forces to a victory at…

Before the war, Abraham Lincoln expressed antislavery sympathies and recorded his hostility to slavery's further expansion, but he opposed abolishing the institution altogether. He continued this stance once elected president. However, as the war…

Horace Greeley, born in 1811 in Amherst, New Hampshire, began his professional life as a printer’s apprentice. In 1841 he founded and edited the Whig paper the New York Tribune. This daily, to which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regularly…

John Thompson’s celebrated poem, “The Burial of Latané,” epically portrays a Confederate victory at Hanover Courthouse, Virginia. In June of 1862, Confederate General J. E. B. Stuart led the 9th Virginia Calvary in a scouting…