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Lawrence, Kansas
Prior to 1854, much of Kansas was part of the Shawnee Indian reservation. Kansas territory was open for settlement in 1854 and with that pronouncement all the trouble began. The country was embroiled in a debate about whether the future states would be slave or free. The Missouri Compromise had declared that all new territories north of latitude 36°30′. The Kansas Nebraska Act spearheaded by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced the concept of popular sovereignty. Let the people of the territory decide whether they would be a slave state or a free state. Sounds good and logical, right? Well, in practice it did not turn out that…
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Battle of Gettysburg
Following his previous foray at Antietam, in the autumn of 1862, Confederate General Robert E Lee planned for a second campaign in the North of America. . He mounted a successful battle in the Campaign of Chancellorsville in May of 1863, where he made the daring tactical decision to split his forces in half against the much bigger Union Army, leaving one half to defend positions at Fredericksburg, In the closing days of June 1863, Lee began to mobilise his army to converge on the town of Gettysb [...]
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Capitol Cage Match – Sumner vs. Brooks.
It was 1856 and the country was embroiled in a conflict over slavery in the territories. The Kansas - Nebraska Act was passed calling for popular sovereignty, which meant the inhabitants in the territory voted on whether they wanted slavery. This led to nasty border wars between free soilers and pro slavery adherents. This boiled over into the sack of Lawrence, Kansas in May 21, 1856. Lawrence was a free soul town, and was burned by pro slavery forces. Many of the pro slavery forces crossed the [...]
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Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell was the second son, and fifth child of Robert Cromwell and Elizabeth Steward. They had ten children in all, Oliver and seven of his sisters survived infancy. Born in Huntingdonshire to a younger son of a wealthy landowner, descended from an older sister of Thomas Cromwell, the Tudor Chief Minister of Henry VIII, Oliver’s great grandfather Richard Williams changed his family name to show respect to his uncle, who had helped out his sister’s family by enabling them to acquire reclaimed land from the dissolution of the monasteries. Oliver once described his family as being on the edge of the gentry with his father’s modest inheritance as the…
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The Angel Glow of the Battle of Shiloh
In April of 1862, the Battle of Shiloh was fought in Hardin County, Tennessee. The Confederate General Albert Johnson attempted to ambush the Federal forces led by General Ulysses S. Grant. The initial assault and the Federal counter attack was one of the bloodiest battles in America to date. There were 23,000 casualties littered over the Tennessee countryside. Medical techniques at the time were rudimentary at best. Many soldiers died of infection and gangrene instead of their original wounds. If they survived the infection, the men faced possible battlefield amputations without anesthesia and no guaranteed success rate. The conditions of the battle made it nearly impossible to get the wounded…
