150 Years Ago This Week: Waiting . . .
July 1865 Of the cast which Abraham Lincoln’s assassin had so hopefully assembled in Washington for the roles he had assigned in the crime, five of them, including himself, were now dead on July 9....
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: Straight out to sea
After waiting nearly three weeks to learn where their sentences for complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln were to be served, Samuel Mudd, Edman Spangler, Michael O’Laughlen and Samuel...
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: Target, San Francisco
On Monday, July 24, Ford’s Theatre in Washington, where Abraham Lincoln was shot on April 14 by John Wilkes Booth, was rented by the U.S. government for $1,500 a month from John T. Ford.
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: The last flag down
As August 1865 began, the country, north and south, was still coming to grips with four intense years of bloody warfare. Out in the vast Pacific Ocean, the Confederate raider CSS Shenandoah cruised...
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: It is finished
When CSS Shenandoah set sail for Liverpool on Aug. 2, 1865 after the crew learned from the British ship Barracouta that the war had ended months earlier and that the Confederacy had collapsed, the...
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: The road to Appomattox
At the end of March, 1865, beyond the lines at Petersburg and in North Carolina, fighting between Union and Confederate troops continued unabated in from Florida to New Mexico Territory. [...] » Read...
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: Richmond evacuated, Petersburg lines broken
With the Confederate disaster at Five Forks on Saturday, April 1, Gen. Lee sent a wire to President Davis in Richmond on Sunday morning, April 2. “I think it is absolutely necessary that we abandon our...
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: The end of the road in Virginia
Events of momentous importance occurred almost daily in the first two weeks of April 1865. [...] » Read the full story at RappNews.com
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: The President is shot!
April 1865 On Wednesday, April 12, on the fourth anniversary of the start of the war, with the city of Charleston, South Carolina in Union hands, Maj. Thomas Hugenan, Fort Sumter’s last Confederate...
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: Two momentous days in April
On Wednesday, April 19, the first of many funeral processions for Abraham Lincoln began, in Washington. It took 20 days over a route which was mostly aligned to the route the 16th president took on his...
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: The Confederacy unravels
On Saturday, April 29, President Andrew Johnson removed trade restrictions in former Confederate states east of the Mississippi River, within military lines. President Jefferson Davis and the remainder...
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: The Confederacy collapses
May 1865 After the surrender of Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor and his Confederate army in Alabama and Mississippi on Thursday, May 4, there remained only Confederate troops under Gen. Kirby Smith in the...
View Article150 Years Ago This Week: The war’s last battle
May 1865 On Friday, May 12, in far southern Texas, some 500 Union troops under command of Col. Theodore Barrett marched inland from Brazos Santiago (now Matamoros), towards Brownsville. Some 300...
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150 Years Ago This Week: The Grand Review
May 1865 On Saturday, May 20, near Longwood, Missouri, Federal troops got into a firefight with Confederate guerrillas on the Blackwater River. This kind of engagement was common as news of the...
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150 Years Ago This Week: A weak start to Reconstruction
Confederate Lt. Gen. Simon B. Buckner entered into a military convention with Union Maj. Gen. Peter Osterhaus. Under the terms of surrender, all resistance would cease and officers and men were to be...
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150 Years Ago This Week: Tennessee restored to the Union
In a court case that was to have long-reaching effects even to the 21st century, Lambdin P. Milligan and William Bowles, condemned to be executed in the first week of June, were reprieved and sentenced...
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150 Years Ago This Week: Legal arguments in Washington
President Andrew Johnson in Washington on Tuesday, June 13, appointed William Sharkey as provisional governor of Mississippi, while the military trial continued of the eight persons accused of...
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150 Years Ago This Week: The last organized surrender
June 1865 On Wednesday, June 21, President Andrew Johnson appointed Lewis E. Parsons as provisional governor of Alabama; this was in keeping with the president’s policy of appointing provisional...
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150 Years Ago This Week: Guilty as charged
On Tuesday, June 27, at about 7.30 p.m., as the sun was setting behind the distant mountains forming the west wall of the Shenandoah Valley, a single volley of six rifles rang out on Rude’s Hill a mile...
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150 Years Ago This Week: The crime has been expiated
In Washington on June 14, the last witness testified in the military trial of the eight people implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the attempted murder of Secretary of State William...
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