Oddities of the War

[traveller]

Brigadier General Philip St. George Cocke of Virginia, a West Point graduate returned home ill after the battle of First Bull Run. He commited suicide on Dec. 26th, the only Confederate General ever to do so.

Traveller

[traveller]

Confederate Isidore Guillen inherited the horse that his two brothers were killed riding on, only to be mortally wounded himself upon the very same horse.

Traveller

[traveller]

When the Civil War Began, U.S.Grant tried to answer the call for volunteers but was rejected.

Traveller

[traveller]

Robert E Lee died October 12, 1870, just two days after a flood had swept the hill country. The Lexington undertaker was embarrassed to report that he had no coffins, since the three he had lately imported from Richmond had been swept away from his river wharf. Two young men volunteered to search for a coffin for the Lee funeral. They sought for hours before discovering one which had been swept over a dam and had lodged on an island some two miles downstream. Thus was provided the coffin in which the Confederacy's greatest figure was buried. The casket was too short for Lee and he was buried without his shoes.

Traveller

[tamaroa]

1) Sam Houston served as a President of a Republic that seceded from Mexico, but he would not condone seceding from the United States.
2) President Zachary Taylor’s daughter was Jefferson Davis’ first wife. She died from Cholera or Malaria, I forgot which.
3) Former U.S. President John Tyler was elected to the Confederate Senate as a Senator representing the Confederate State of Virginia.
4) Former U.S. Vice President John Breckenridge and 1860 U.S. Presidential candidate served the Confederacy as a Major General.
5) Mary Todd Lincoln had three relatives that served in the Confederate Army.
6) Wesley Culp, a Private in the Confederate Army was KIA near Culp’s Hill in Gettysburg on his uncle’s farm.
7) Patrick Henry’s Grandson fought at Gettysburg in the Confederate Army.
Before the war started, Armistead and Hancock, with Garnett went to a farewell bash where Hancock’s wife sang for all of them. 2 years later, Hancock’s troops fired on and killed Armistead and Garnett.
9) On April 6, 1865, the Confederate army, famished, shoeless and many without guns charged Union lines. There was hand-to-hand combat that was so ferocious; soldiers were biting one another’s throats and ears.
10) Three days later at Appomattox, Grant and Lee shook hands and everybody went home. To me that speaks volumes. The nation underwent a violent Civil war for 4 years over a million casualties killed, wounded and missing and it all ended with a handshake. What other nation in this world could do that?
11) During the Spanish American War three former Confederate cavalry Generals fought for the US flag, Tom Rosser, Joe Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee.

[thea_447]

Only 3 percent of all firearms made in the United States in 1860 were produced in the South.

In 1836 Cadet Lewis A. Armistead, who died leading a brigade in Pickett's Charge, was expelled from West Point for breaking a dinner plate over the head of Jubal A. Early, who rose to command a corps in the Confederate Army.

[thea_447]

George B. McClellan, who was something of a child prodigy, had to secure special permission of the secretary of war to be admitted to West Point in 1842, since he was only 15 years old.

For some years before the War, Ambrose P. Hill courted one Ellen Marcy, who jilted him and married his erstwhile West Point roommate, George B. McClellan, a fact to which the troops attributed Hill's singular aggressiveness against his successful rival, so that during one attack a Union veteran was hear to cry, "My God, Nellie, why didn't you marry him"?"

[thea_447]

The Richmond Howitzers, a Virginia militia company which would prove a tough outfit in the coming war, once buried a pet crow in an elaborate military ceremony which included two eulogies in English plus an oration in Latin and an ode in Greek.

Invited to drill his hometown militia company while on graduation leave from West Point in the summer of 1846, the newly minted 2nd Lt. Thomas J. Jackson bungled the job so badly that he marched the men off the parade ground and right out of town.

[thea_447]

Only 5 percent of the money expended on the war by the Confederacy was raised by taxation and a further 5 percent through miscellaneous fees and revenues, while 30 percent was provided from loans, and fully 60 percent by printing paper money, whereas the Union derived 4 percent from miscellaneous fees and revenues, 6.2 percent from loans, 21 percent from taxes, and only 13 percent by printing greenbacks.

The first income tax in American history was instituted by the Union on 1 July 1862, a measure which was copied in the Confederacy nine months later.

Francis Scott "The Star Spangled Banner" Key's entire family supported secession.

[thea_447]

During the first battle of Bull Run there were present in the vicinity of the field at least one governor, six senators and ten representatives, in addition to one president, Yankees all save the last, who was Jefferson Davis.

When Hetty Cary, one of a trio of cousins who were the "prettiest women in Virginia" and outstanding lights of Richmond social life during the war, waved a Confederate flag from her Baltimore window as a Federal regiment marched by, the colonel declined to arrest her because, "She is beautiful enough to do as she ****ed pleases."