Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest .. Suffers his biggest defeat when Union General Andrew J. Smith routs his force in Tupelo, Mississippi. The battle came just a month after the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads, Mississippi, in which Forrest engineered a…
Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and 272 of his troops are killed in an assault on Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina. Shaw was commander of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, perhaps the most famous regiment of African-American troops during the…
The day is July 17, 1864, Confederate President Jefferson Davis replaces General Joseph Johnston with John Bell Hood as commander of the Army of Tennessee. Davis, impatient with Johnston’s defensive strategy in the Atlanta campaign, felt that Hood stood a…
Dec 12, 1806: Cherokee leader and Confederate General Stand Watie is born On this day in 1806, Confederate General Stand Watie is born near Rome, Georgia. Watie, a Cherokee Indian, survived the tribe’s Trail of Tears in the 1830s and…
Alice Shirley A resident of Wexford Lodge, born in Vicksburg to a family of Northern stock, Alice and her brothers kept their Union sympathies to themselves when their state seceded. Federal troops later besieged their home, Wexford Lodge, which fell…
Gerhard (or Gerrit) Roosen (1612-1711) was a Mennonite bishop in northern Germany. He is famous today mostly for the catechism he published when he was 90 years old, the Christliches Gemütsgespräch or “Christian Spiritual Conversation on Saving Faith and the Acknowledging of the Truth…
Herbert Coleridge, lexicographer Born 1830, Died 1861 When we think about the necessities of looking up a word in this era, it’s typically as easy as pulling it up on our phone with a quick Google search. Rarely, if at…
John Bell Hood Confederate general Served from 1853–1861 (US), and 1861–1865 (CSA) Hood attended the United States Military Academy, supposedly against his fathers’ wishes. Although Hood was native to Kentucky, he preferred his adoptive state of Texas, and joined the…
