cleveland – Page 27 – The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable

Where is Lincoln Memorial University? What Was One of Lincoln’s Biggest Tactical Errors of the Civil War? What’s the Connection Between The Two?

By Dick Crews
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Lincoln Memorial University must be in Illinois or Washington, D.C. or Kentucky, right? No, no, and no, Lincoln Memorial University is in one of the strongest of Confederate states, Tennessee.

Lincoln and the Black Hawk War

By Dale Thomas
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2004, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from a chapter of Dale Thomas’s book, Lincoln’s Old Friends of Menard County, Illinois. After his failure to win the Whig nomination for Congress in 1843, Lincoln wrote to a political associate: “It is truly gratifying to me to learn that while the people of Sangamon [County] have cast me off, my old friends of Menard [County] who have known me longest and best of any, still retain their confidence in me.”¹

Lincoln and Cleveland

By Dale Thomas
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2003, All Rights Reserved

Artemus Ward

In 1857, Charles Farrar Brown became the local editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and began to write articles about an itinerant showman named Artemus Ward. Later moving on to Vanity Fair in New York City, Brown’s humorous commentary of the news was admired and enjoyed by Lincoln. “With the fearful strain that is on me night and day,” he told his Cabinet, “if I did not laugh I should die…”

Lincoln’s Assassination: Three Riddles

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2011, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from a book on the Lincoln assassination by the author, Decapitating the Union: Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and the Plot to Assassinate Lincoln

Johnson’s Island

By Dale Thomas
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2002, 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in The Charger in March 2002.

During Career Day at Bay High School in 1990, Professor David R. Bush talked to my students about archaeology. He invited me to observe his excavations that summer on Johnson’s Island in Sandusky Bay, Ohio. What most intrigued me were the remains of collapsed escape tunnels that he had found leading from some of the sink (latrine) structures to the stockade walls. The soil of one of these tunnels yielded a gold watch and a gold locket with the remains of a photograph and lock of hair tied with a ribbon. He also discovered a large iron bar and cow bone that were apparently used for digging. (Bush wrote an article in Archaeology magazine in 1999.) Before leaving the island, I went to the prison cemetery where the remains of 235 prisoners are buried. Only 12 Confederates were able to escape from the island but not to the mirage across the bay, Cedar Point Amusement Park.

Lincoln Visits Cleveland

By Dale Thomas
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in the spring of 2002.

On the way to Washington, three days after his 53rd birthday, President-elect Abraham Lincoln stopped overnight in Cleveland for his only visit to the city. (Three days later in Montgomery, Alabama, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Confederacy.) To feel the immediacy of the times, the story is best told directly from the pages of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which was then an evening newspaper. These accounts are quoted over a two-day period beginning on Friday evening, February 15, 1861.

James McPherson Speaks On Lincoln

By William F.B. Vodrey
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2000, 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: James M. McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, amongst other Civil War books, spoke at The Western Reserve Historical Society in April 2000. This report on McPherson’s talk by then Roundtable President William Vodrey was originally published in The Charger in the fall of that same year.

Mr. Lincoln at 200

By William F.B. Vodrey
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2009, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This is adapted from an article that originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of The Charger.

In February we honor all those who have served as President of the United States. By coincidence, the birthdays of two of the republic’s great early leaders, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, both fall in February. Unfortunately, what were once distinct holidays are now one, the rather generic “Presidents’ Day.”

Booth in the Confederate Secret Service

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2012, All Rights Reserved

John Wilkes Booth was an agent of the Confederate Secret Service. It is not known, and may never be known, when or exactly under what circumstances he was recruited and accepted his role as such, but that he was an agent and was in regular contact with other agents, who had ties to the Confederate leadership, or who had ties to other agents who had such ties, has been firmly established. Asia Booth described her brother as “a spy, a blockade-runner, a rebel!”¹

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