U.S. Civil War History bits

Just saw this-
"FOLLY BEACH, S.C. (WCIV) — Several agencies are responding to Ashley Avenue on Folly Beach to examine Civil War artillery that surfaced as a result of Hurricane Matthew.

According to the Charleston County Sheriff's Office, the artillery occupies several yards of beach near the end of East Ashley Avenue.

Bomb technicians from Charleston County and the U.S. Air Force will evaluate the situation once the tide recedes. Officials say no one will be allowed to access the area until it is deemed safe."
http://abcnews4.com/news/local/civil-war-artillery-surfaces-on-folly-beach-after-hurricane-matthew

 

Haven't listened to this yet (2hrs), but given the usual quality of The War Nerd's output I'm reasonably sure it'll be interesting stuff:

Radio War Nerd EP #47 [*REPOST/unlocked] — North Carolina's Civil War
https://www.patreon.com/posts/radio-war-nerd-6970798

 

I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that a pile of iron balls that have been underwater for 156 years are 'safe.'

 

Yeah, but elfin safety, mate.....

 

Don't know. A number of years back a guy from Dalton, GA, or thereabouts, found an artillery round in a creek that they think had been there since the 1864 Battle of Resaca. He took it home and was cleaning it up in his garage when it blew up.

 

I thought that was Virginia, IIRC, from 2008. Killed him and sent shrapnel up to a half mile away.

If they are naval shells, they will have waterproof fuses.

Of course, if they are solid shot, there is no explosive core to detonate.

 

That was the Sam White incident. There was one, Lawrence Christopher, in Georgia (Dalton again) in 2006 where the guy was injured. The one I was talking about happened two or three years before that.

 

I read a story about a ACW exploding ordnance incident that occurred in early WW2 here in Baton Rouge. While the Army Air Corps was rapidly expanding Harding Field (current day Baton Rouge Metro Airport), incoming troops were quartered everywhere. A few were posted in the old Spanish Arsenal on the State Capitol grounds for awhile. During the early winter of 1942 some northern troops found that it does indeed get cold down south, so one of them found several over-sized cannon balls hid away in the arsenal. They used them as andirons, heating them up in hopes that heat would be radiated in the room. Well one of the cannon balls got red hot and exploded, killing one soldier and injuring several others. The headlines in the paper the next day read "Civil War cannon ball kills Yankee soldier 75 Years After the War" or something like that.

 

Came across this interesting little snippet-
"While women were, obviously, not permitted to participate on an official level during the American Civil War, they did find ways to make their mark, as women have in numerous wars throughout history. There were specifically quite a few women who worked as spies for both sides during the conflict. From masters of disguise to former slaves, here are six female Civil War spies who fought with gusto."
http://argunners.com/six-female-civil-war-spies-made-mark/

 

Some food for thought-
"Conventional wisdom says the first shots of the Civil War came at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, but 156 years ago this week, they may well have come in Pensacola.
As 1861 opened, everyone knew that war was on the horizon. South Carolina had seceded from the Union just weeks earlier on December 20, little more than a month after Abraham Lincoln’s election as president. With ordinances of secession under debate in several other Southern states, local militias across the south had begun to seize federal property and fortifications.

In Pensacola, Union forces were stationed at the Navy Yard (present-day Naval Air Station Pensacola), and at nearby Fort Barrancas, while Forts McRee and Pickens in the harbor were unmanned. At Barrancas, 32-year-old First Lieutenant Adam J. Slemmer of Pennsylvania was in command, with company commander Captain John Winder — a future Confederate general — away on leave. Lt. Slemmer commanded a garrison of just 51 men.
On January 8, Slemmer outlined the situation at Barrancas in a letter to his superiors:
There are rumors that the citizens of Florida and Alabama intend taking possession of the fortifications in this harbor. They have already taken those at Mobile and Savannah. I am stationed with one company (G, First Artillery) at Barrancas Barracks, having also Fort Barrancas in charge. There are no accommodations for troops in the fort. Fort Pickens (unoccupied) commands the harbor, and should that work be taken possession of our position would be useless as far as any protection to the harbor goes.
Lt. Adam J. Slemmer, Jan. 8, 1861

Later that night, a group of local men tried to take Fort Barrancas, likely thinking it was unoccupied. Slemmer’s second-in-command, Lt. Jeremiah H. Gilman, later recounted the events:

On January 8th the first step indicating to outsiders an intention on our part to resist was taken, by the removal of the powder from the Spanish fort to Fort Barrancas, where on the same night a guard was placed with loaded muskets. It was none too soon, for about midnight a party of twenty men came to the fort, evidently with the intention of taking possession, expecting to find it unoccupied as usual. Being challenged and not answering nor halting when ordered, the party was fired upon by the guard and ran in the direction of Warrington, their footsteps resounding on the plank walk as the long roll ceased and our company started for the fort at double-quick. This, I believe, was the first gun in the war fired on our side."
http://pulsegulfcoast.com/2017/01/civil-wars-first-shots-come-pensacola

 

Interesting!
"THE 1874 to 1876 Egyptian-Ethiopian War is one of the 19th century’s more obscure conflicts.

Among the most surprising aspects of the conflict is that it involved a group of ex-Confederate officers who had been hired by an Ottoman viceroy to conquer an empire in central Africa.

These Confederate veterans had fought in the U.S. Civil War, in part to preserve a social system based on the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. However, along with some Union officers, less than 10 years after the fall of the Confederacy they found themselves posted more than 6,000 miles from home, in new uniforms and leading columns of African troops into the Ethiopian highlands."
Confederates of the Nile – Meet the Civil War Vets Who Volunteered to Fight for the Egyptian Army

 

A little dark history from the ACW.

The Terrible Truth About Abraham Lincoln and the Confederate War

Damn Yankees.

 

Sorry A-58, there is little truth, terrible or otherwise, in that ignorant polemic, but quite a bit of innuendo and re-writing of history. The best evidence that the Civil War in fact was about slavery and not about some imagined "oppression" by the North is in the language of the actual ordinances of secession by the states. They said, at the time, that secession was about slavery, full stop. Lincoln did everything in his power to preserve the Union, which left a lot of people butthurt in the end. Too fffing bad. Apparently including the clueless dude that wrote this tripe. I won't give this nonsense much time, but no, sorry, the "writ of habeus corpus" is not a "function" of Congress, no, 85% of the country's revenue was not generated by "harsh tariffs"...no, sorry, no further, this asshat must work for Infowars. I'm done with this crap.

 

Damn yankees.

 

Damned rebels.

 

It is pronounced as one word, Damnyankees

Having secured my Southern cred, the article is utter tripe. The only thing the author got right was that history has over deified Lincoln as a saint. He was a man with all the flaws we all have, but he was not a tyrant. Did he push the law as far as he could to preserve the Union in a time of trial, yes he did. but so did FDR during the depression and WWII.

Slavery was the original sin of the United States of America and it was allowed and condoned to allow the original 13 colonies to form a unified nation. It was allowed to continue, despite numerous Constitutional crises to keep the country from breaking apart. The author bemoans the destruction of the Constitution while forgetting that enshrined in it was the accounting of Slaves as 3/4 of a person for demographic reasons concerning representation in Congress while allowing them no protection under the Constitution. While the Constitution is a great document, even from the beginning it was as flawed as the men who wrote it. Fortunately it had the ability to grow or change when needed.

The central problem for the elite of the South was that no amount of rigging the game could prevent the inevitable. Sooner or later demographics (population) would break the country free from the stranglehold of Southern political power. It could be argued that it was the North that suffered from Southern oppression as much or more than the reverse. The Fugitive Slave Act forced Northern states that outlawed slavery (Ironically exercising States Rights) to support slavery within the South against their collective will. Then there was ultimate club, a threat of Secession unless they got their way.

What the author conveniently forgot to mention was the South fired first while the Federal Government was trying to negotiate a peaceful solution and that Jefferson C. Davis employed as many 'undemocratic' measures as Lincoln against his own people. No doubt the author might respond that Davis was pushed to extremes to save his 'country', then again so was Lincoln.

The truth of the matter was that the South was suffering from no Norther Oppression until they fired upon Fort Sumter. They had full representation (actually, over representation concerning the counting of slaves) in the U S Congress, Their own freely elected state and local governments, their own banks and currency, their own state and local armed militia's and a free press.

Yes, eventually either the US Congress or the Supreme Court would end slavery as a institution, but when that event happened was yet to be seen. Almost certainly not during a Lincoln administration and quite possibly not until as late as the beginning of the 20th century. It was the South's self-fulfilling mania that brought upon all the tribulations the author bemoan's.

I was born in the South, consider myself a Southerner, have family who served in the Army of Northern Virginia (as well as the Union Army), but I would be ashamed of living in a Apartheid Confederate States of America, and lets be clear here, this is what this author is saying should have happened.

 

Well, at least some damned rebels have more patience with this sort of tripe than I do.

Very well done sir.

 

Only in response to Russian interference in our Civil War. Reputed to be one of Putin's first acts as a KGB officer.

 

The Yankees always had better rations too.