Category Archives: American History

Paul Cuffee

Posted on by

The story of how Paul Cuffee made his way from farmer’s son to wealthy ship owner might not sound unique unless you consider that he was African American.  In his lifetime, free African Americans were not entitled to vote in most states and slavery was still a common practice.

Cuffee’s father, Kofi, was born in Africa, a member of the Ashanti tribe, and was transported to the colonies as a slave.  His owner, a Quaker, felt that slave ownership and his religion were in conflict, and so, freed Kofi who, having gained his freedom, worked to support his family, eventually acquiring a 116-acre Massachusetts farm which Cuffee and his siblings inherited. Cuffee’s mother, Ruth Moses, was a Native America of the Wampanoag tribe.

Cuffee the shipbulider

Born 17 January 1759, Paul Cuffee was one of ten children. As a youngster, Cuffee worked on whaling ships and learnt the art of navigation sailing out from the ports of Massachusetts. Spurred on, he built his own ship which he used to trade locally before venturing out to Nantucket. Soon he made enough of a profit to purchase another ship, eventually owning a whole fleet and, in the process, becoming one of the richest African Americans in the US.

Continue reading →

Mathew Brady

Posted on by

Kat Smutz presents a brief summary on the life of the American Civil War photographer, Mathew Brady

Mathew (with one ‘t’) Brady might well be considered the first photojournalist and has been called “The Father of Photojournalism” for his work in documenting the American Civil War.  Because of the extensive work by Brady and his associates, we know much about the American Civil War and the latter half of the 19th century than would have been otherwise.

Brady studied under daguerreotypist Samuel FB Morse, inventor of the Morse code.  By 1844, Brady was already working from his own studio in New York.  A year later, he began exhibiting portraits of famous Americans.  In 1849, he opened a studio in Washington, DC, where he met and married Juliet Handy in 1851.

Brady’s work began with daguerreotypes, which were printed on tin, but in the 1850s he began working with ambrotypes, and later, albumen prints that could be reproduced on paper.  It was the albumen prints that were most common among his Civil War work.

Photographing the American Civil War

Continue reading →

Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross

Posted on by

The founder of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton, was born on Christmas Day 190 years ago in 1821. A pioneer teacher, nurse and humanitarian, Barton began nursing at the age of eleven when her brother, David, was injured in a fall. She tended to him for three years, learning to administer his medications and the art of leeching.

Barton began caring for civil war patients from the outset of the American Civil War. The US Senate chamber in Washington DC had become a makeshift hospital where she tended soldiers from Massachusetts. It was after the First Battle of Bull Run that she established an agency for acquiring and distributing medical supplies to the wounded. In 1862, she finally received permission to travel in ambulances to the battlefields where she was to witness some of the bloodiest scenes of the war.

Continue reading →

Refugees In The Wilderness

Posted on by

In the spring of 1776 events were moving rapidly in America. Lexington and Concord had occurred one year before. The Continental Congress was in Philadelphia deciding the future course of the colonies. People were divided over their loyalties throughout the country including the colony of New York.

At the center of this in New York was Sir John Johnson, the leading loyalist in the Mohawk Valley.

Growing rift

Sir John seemed unable to hold back the movement towards independence in the valley. In late August 1774 the first meeting of the Palatine district Committee of Safety met in Stone Arabia. Members discussed the growing rift from England and how to assert their rights in what they felt was increasing oppression. Meetings like this one would continue throughout the colony in months to come. Patriot leaders would begin to fill leadership roles in civil affairs and the militia.  As author Candice Millard states in her book Liberty’s Exiles, these committees administered loyalty oaths that were a marker of differentiating patriot and loyalist. People who refused to swear to them faced jail, banishment, or having their property confiscated.

Continue reading →

The Day of Infamy

Posted on by

How Japan’s hollow victory spelt the end for Hitler

Seventy years ago today, 7 December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the US. In just two hours it destroyed a large part of the US fleet docked in Pearl Harbor and, in one stroke, forever destroyed US isolationism, united the country for war and made the conflict global.

The US may have been expecting war but the attack on Pearl Harbor took it totally by surprise. Yet 11 months before, a lone voice had predicted such a possibility. On the 27 January 1941, the US ambassador in Japan, Joseph Grew, cabled the White House warning that the Japanese might ‘attempt a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor using all their military facilities’.

As 1941 wore on, the likelihood of war became more apparent but the US ignored Grew’s prediction, believing that conflict, if it came, would either start in the US-controlled Philippines or the Dutch or British possessions in Southeast Asia.

Continue reading →

Louisa May Alcott and the American Civil War

Posted on by

Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, had the briefest of nursing careers: about six weeks, from start to finish.  Alcott being Alcott, she effectively morphed the experience into grist for her literary mill.

Alcott was not a Big Gun in nursing history. Her musings are not technically significant, like Florence Nightingale’s contemporaneous Notes on Nursing.  Her service does not resonate through Civil War history like that of her influential contemporaries, Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton. The product of Alcott’s nursing experience was Hospital Sketches (1863), the story of a bedside army nurse at a time when the bedside army nurse was also, typically, a Victorian spinster.  Alcott’s tale of grit and grace is as compelling now as it was in the nineteenth century.

Louisa May Alcott, daughter of philosopher Bronson Alcott, grew up in New England with prominent Transcendentalists such as Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Emerson as family friends. Unfortunately, Bronson Alcott’s philosophical proclivities often got in the way of his better judgment, and his family suffered real poverty and instability as a result. Louisa evolved from the chaos as her mother’s mainstay in keeping the family going. Thus, she learned service and selflessness early and perhaps a little too well.

Continue reading →

Nat Turner – the Slave Who Killed For God

Posted on by

There were as many as 250 slave revolts in the American South during the antebellum period before the American Civil War. But it was the uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, led by Nat Turner that, by the scale of its ferocity, caused the greatest shock. 180 years ago today, 11 November, Turner was hung, skinned and beheaded.

Born a slave in 1800, the young Nat Turner delighted and astounded his fellow slaves by describing events from before he was born. The boy, his parents exclaimed, was a prophet. His master’s son taught the young Nat to read and he grew up a pious, God-fearing man, influenced by visions or messages from God. He devoured the bible, prayed and fasted and became convinced that God had chosen him to lead his fellow slaves out of servitude.

Listening to God

Aged 21, Turner ran away from his master but voluntarily returned after a month having received God’s instruction to ‘return to the service of my earthly master’.

Continue reading →

The 16th Street Baptist church bombing

Posted on by

During the first two weeks of September 1963 the Civil Rights movement in the US was feeling confident – they had hope, hope that change, real change, was in the air. They had on their side President Kennedy; the Civil Rights bill had every chance of becoming law and, in Dr Martin Luther King, Jnr, they had a leader capable of stirring the conscience within every strata of society, from government to the common man.

The March on Washington

Only days before, on 28 August, 250,000 Americans had demonstrated their solidarity for the movement by taking part in the March on Washington. Black and white, rich and poor, young and old, swayed in time as Bob Dylan sung Blowin’ In The Wind and Joan Baez led the singing of We Shall Overcome. Then they intently listened as King, surrounded by a bank of microphones, spoke of his dream.

The bombing

But then on Sunday morning, the 15 September 1963, four white men, members of the Ku Klux Klan, planted a bomb consisting of dynamite beneath a Baptist church on Sixteenth Street in Birmingham, Alabama.

Continue reading →

The True Beginning of the American Civil War?

Posted on by

This year, much was made over the fact that April 12, 2011 was the 150th year anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. It was on that date in 1861 that the Confederacy fired upon Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor.  It is true that at the time, after the attack on Sumter, outrage and indignation fueled a desire and a call for war in the North, but calls for war does not make actual war, in which armies clash and soldiers die. No such action occurred for weeks after Fort Sumter, because it was physically impossible.

It is reasonable to argue that the Civil War did not and could not begin with Fort Sumter for two key reasons.

The first reason is that neither side had actual armies formed up and in position to fight at the time of the Fort Sumter attack. Abraham Lincoln, on April 15, had to put out a call for 75,000 soldiers to come forward and form an army because he had nothing with which to fight the South, and it would take weeks after that call for the first elements of the army to arrive at Washington. The South was in no better position and had to begin creating its own armies if it was to carry out its part in a war.

Continue reading →

9/11 – a summary

Posted on by

It was the first multiple hijacking in the United States, and the first in the world in more than thirty years.  On September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists boarded four commercial jetliners, all transcontinental flights, carrying a maximum load of 11,400 gallons of jet fuel.  Their objective was to take control of the planes once they were airborne and turn them into flying weapons of destruction.

Four targets had been chosen, all iconic American buildings that would send a clear message of the depth of their hatred for the United States.  All four planes crashed, killing all on board—terrorists, crew members, and passengers, along with hundreds who were killed inside the structures, on the ground, and the men and women who ran into collapsing buildings in an effort to try and save others.

Only one of the four planes did not find its target.  Thanks to cellular phones, passengers heard of the other crashes and chose to sacrifice themselves rather than let another plane devastate a fourth target, killing even more innocent people.

What little is known of actual events on board the four flights comes from brief radio communications, observation by witnesses on the ground and phone calls made by crew and passengers.  The scenario on all four flights seems to have been basically the same.

Continue reading →