The Civil War ended and all those young men--both north and south--who survived went home where they either resumed their old existence or began new ones. None of them were unscathed. In this sad, anxious time, I thought I'd post about one of them whose story was amusing.
Major William Oscar Howe (1st Maine SharpShooters and 20th Maine Infantry) may have returned briefly to this town where his family members were all local farmers but he soon took off for Massachusetts and then for California. In California he settled on a really tiny island off the coast of Oakland; it was so small that I had to contact the Presidio for help in finding it. In 1898 he was so outraged by the election of Mark Hanna to the US Senate that he seceded! He ran up his own flag and (as his obituary states) was "king for a day".
The national newspapers had a field day. Several suggested that a Yankee officer ought to know that secession doesn't end well and a newspaper in Kansas said that perhaps the US ought to secede from Major Howe.
It all worked out in the end. After 2 weeks, Major Howe rejoined the Union. But his GAR post convicted him of treason and expelled him from membership. At the height of the furor, his long-suffering wife ran off with a solar biologist. But just consider how uneventful his life might have been had he returned to being a farmer in Maine!
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