Oddities of the War

Thea,
I know lead is heavy and it doesn't take much to equate 900 pounds but that does sound high. Sounds a bit like someone was over-billing the Gov for the lead they supposedly had. After the war someone divided the lead the Gov bought by the men shot and came up with a pretty high total. Never noticing someone was an alchemist who had discovered the true Philosopher's tone. Turning lead into gold.


YMOS
tommy

[jenna]

See, I had heard somewhere that it took 900 rounds to equal one kill. Sorry, I don't remember where I heard that, but just remember it. One of those oddities.

Jenna

[thea_447]

A young Confederate officer, Captain S. Isadore Guillet, was fatally shot on the same horse on which three of his brothers had been previously killed. He willed the animal to a nephew as he died.

Claude Pardigon, a Frenchman en route to join the Southern cause, challenged the skipper of a blockade-runner to a duel because he did not provide toothbrushes for passengers.

[thea_447]

Some Mexican companies of the Confederate armies gained a reputation for unreliability. Private Juan Ivra was not of this stripe. In one Western action he staged a one-man charge into the faces of forty astonished Federals, and forced them to flee.

[thea_447]

Slaves in Virginia could be hired for $30 a month in 1863. Yet the pay of an Army private was $11 per month. Confederate pay rose to $18 per month the next year.

Union privates drew only $16, but the gold value of their pay was more than seven times greater than that of Confederates.

[thea_447]

The Confederate General, Nathan Bedford Forrest, classed by some historians as the war's most able cavalry commander, had twenty-nine horses shot from under him in the course of the war.

The town of Winchester, Virginia changed hands seventy-six times during the war, as the armies surged to and fro in the Northern Shenandoah Valley.

Years before the war Jesse Grant, father of Ulysses, lived and worked in the home of Owen Brown, whose small son, playing noisily about the frontier homestead, grew up to be John Brown, the Abolitionist who lit the fuse of the war.

[thea_447]

Eight Federal generals came from the small town of Galena, Illinois (15,000 population). They probably owed their rank to their friendship with U.S.Grant, the most celebrated wartime citizen of the place.


Of the 425 Confederate generals, 77 were killed or died of wounds during the war. The last surviving lieutenant general of the Southern armies was Simon Bolivar Buckner, who lived until 1914; his son and namesake was killed as a general in World War II.

[thea_447]

Joseph E. Johnston, the "dean" of Confederate generals, who was jealous of his seniority, lost his hair from an illness, and wore a hat at table during the war, to the undisguised amusement of his servants.

Under the terms of Johnston's surrender to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, many more men were surrendered than Lee gave up at Appomattox.

In postwar years Johnston served as pallbearer for several prominent Union generals, including U.S.Grant. His last such service was for William T. Sherman, his conqueror. While paying his respects to Sherman in the cemetary on a raw winter day, Johnston contracted a severe cold which became pneumonia and caused his death.

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History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

[thea_447]

Major Gen. "Uncle" John Sedgwick, the oldest corps commander in the Army of the Potomac was so well-liked that when he was killed in action on 9 May 1864, U.S. Grant was so stunned as to twice ask,
"Is he really dead?"

Arriving early and in mufti for an appointment with a lady whom he had not previously met, John C. Breckinridge was asked for three references, to which he replied, "Former Vice-President of the United States, former United States Senator, and Major General, Provisional Army of the Confederate States of America," whereupon his embarrassed hostess explained that he had been mistaken for an applicant for employment as a footman.

[thea_447]

So confused were the lines during the battle of the Wilderness that at one point a group of Federal infantrymen blundered into a group of Confederates and, thinking themselves outgunned, quickly fell back, thereby missing a chance to bag Robert E. Lee, A.P. Hill, and J.E.B. Stuart, who were conferring with their staffs.

Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman estimated that his "March to the Sea" inflicted $100,000,000 worth of damage on Georgia, of which only about a quarter was "useful to the army."