Civil War

The Disappearance of Civil War Veteran Dudley Goodwin

March 20, 2022 by David Fiske Leave a Comment

One hundred years ago a long-standing citizen of Ballston Spa went missing.

Usually known as Dudley Goodwin, his name was sometimes given as M. Dudley Goodwin (which is what appears on his tombstone). According to information on Find-A-Grave, his first name was Madison. He was born in Fulton County, on the second day of April, 1844. A sister was also born in Fulton County, about 1841, but Dudley’s other siblings were born in Saratoga County. [Read more…] about The Disappearance of Civil War Veteran Dudley Goodwin

Ways and Means: Lincoln, His Cabinet & Financing Civil War

March 4, 2022 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis, including a Treasury that had run out of money. Amid the unprecedented troubles of the Confederacy seceding from the Union, Lincoln saw opportunity — the chance to legislate in the centralizing spirit of the “more perfect Union” that had first drawn him to politics.

The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) will host a presentation by Roger Lowenstein on his book Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet on the Financing of the Civil War (Penguin, 2022), on Wednesday, March 9th. In this program, Lowenstein will look at, through a financial lens, the largely untold story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil War to transform a union of states into a united nation. [Read more…] about Ways and Means: Lincoln, His Cabinet & Financing Civil War

NYS Library Acquires Lincoln Scholar Harold Holzer’s Papers

March 4, 2022 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The New York State Library has recently acquired the complete works of Lincoln scholar and Archives Partnership Trust Board Member Harold Holzer. The collection covers his 49-year career as a writer, lecturer, and historian specializing in Abraham Lincoln and Civil War era. [Read more…] about NYS Library Acquires Lincoln Scholar Harold Holzer’s Papers

James Eldridge Quinlan: Catskills Publisher, Historian & Copperhead

February 21, 2022 by John Conway Leave a Comment

Decades of polls of the general public and of noted scholars alike have repeatedly shown that most Americans consider Abraham Lincoln our greatest president.

That was not always the case.

And it wasn’t just those living below the Mason-Dixon Line who reviled our sixteenth president while he was in office. There was a strong anti-Lincoln sentiment in parts of the North, too, including here in Sullivan County, where a number of notable Monticello men were known to be pro-slavery Southern sympathizers, or Copperheads, as they became known.

James Eldridge Quinlan, editor of one of the county’s most prominent newspapers, The Republican Watchman, was one such man. Quinlan made no secret of his political leanings, and in fact his sentiments were so well known that at one point a group of men with opposite leanings threatened to blow up the Watchman office in order to eliminate Quinlan’s platform. [Read more…] about James Eldridge Quinlan: Catskills Publisher, Historian & Copperhead

Truman Kingsley: ‘Boss Drummer’ of the Civil War

January 27, 2022 by Maury Thompson 5 Comments

Truman Kingsley of Glens Falls, Warren County, NY was a drummer in the Civil War. When he returned home from battle, he never stopped drumming.

Kingsley, who was 44 when he enlisted in the Union Army, was older than many of his fellow veterans, who averaged 25.8 years old when they served, according to the American Battlefield Trust. [Read more…] about Truman Kingsley: ‘Boss Drummer’ of the Civil War

Wall St History: 19th Century Growth of Investment Banking

January 24, 2022 by James S. Kaplan 3 Comments

With the demise of the Philadelphia based Bank of the United States, the financial center of the country shifted to the privately owned state chartered financial firms on Wall Street.

As the nation recovered from the severe depression in the Panic of 1837, President James K. Polk’s policy of Manifest Destiny took root and significant westward settlement of Indigenous land expanded in the 1840s. Fortified by the Erie Canal and its Canal Fund, Wall Street financial institutions became strongly influenced by four factors: the invention of the telegraph; the development of railroads; the discovery of gold and other precious minerals in the West (particularly the California Gold Rush of 1849); and the arrival of significant numbers of Jewish and Irish immigrants in the city of New York. [Read more…] about Wall St History: 19th Century Growth of Investment Banking

The Spirit of the Times: A 19th Century Chronicle of American Sports

January 14, 2022 by Bill Orzell Leave a Comment

In the early 1800s it was unusual for Americans to be interested in sporting matters on their own shores. News from Europe was the only sporting news of merit, and publishing an American sporting journal was considered a risky use of capital.

The first attempt along these lines may have been in 1829 Baltimore, where John S. Skinner published a monthly magazine which focused on race horse pedigrees called The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine. Another early attempt was published in New York by the recognized writer and horseman Cadwallader R. Colden, whose organ was called The New-York Sporting Magazine and Annals of the American and English Turf, first published in 1833.

Among the most notable of the sporting press arrived in 1831, when William T. Porter and James Haw published the first issue of The Spirit of the Times, focusing on horse literature and sporting subjects. They had chosen the name for their broadsheet from a quotation in Shakespeare’s King John, “The spirit of the times shall teach me speed.” [Read more…] about The Spirit of the Times: A 19th Century Chronicle of American Sports

Gymnastics History: The Legacy of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s Turnerism

December 27, 2021 by Jaap Harskamp 4 Comments

By the mid-nineteenth century European gymnastics was an established system that had evolved through a century of innovation and adaptation. Originating in the Enlightenment with the
experiments of educational reformers intent on reviving a Greek ideal which the Roman poet Juvenal had summarized as mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body), gymnastics achieved widespread recognition after Friedrich Ludwig Jahn initiated the Turnverein (gymnastics club) movement.

The inventor of apparatus such as the balance beam, parallel bars, and vaulting horse, he used the discipline of organized exercise to inspire young gymnasts with a sense of national (Prussian) duty and solidarity. Jahn turned gymnastics into an agency of German patriotism.

The ambiguity of his message: enjoyment of competition and companionship versus militant nationalism, brought about Jahn’s contrasting legacies in Europe and the United States. [Read more…] about Gymnastics History: The Legacy of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s Turnerism

The Civil War Confederate Army’s Forced Labor Slave Records

December 27, 2021 by Editorial Staff 2 Comments

During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Army required enslavers to loan the people they held enslaved to the military. Throughout the Confederacy from Florida to Virginia, these enslaved people served as cooks and laundresses, labored in deadly conditions to mine potassium nitrate to create gunpowder, worked in ordnance factories, and dug the extensive defensive trench networks that defended cities such as Petersburg, Virginia.

To track this extensive network of thousands of enslaved people and the pay their enslavers received for their lease, the Confederate Quartermaster Department created the record series now called the “Confederate Slave Payrolls.” [Read more…] about The Civil War Confederate Army’s Forced Labor Slave Records

A Little-Known Civil War Hero From The Catskills

December 19, 2021 by John Conway 2 Comments

He was born on December 12, 1838 in Highland Mills, in Orange County, and moved with his family to Sullivan County while still a young boy.

He enlisted in the Union Army shortly after the Civil War broke out, eventually achieving the rank of Captain.

In April of 1865, while serving with Company B of the 86th New York Infantry at Amelia Springs, Virginia, he captured the Confederate flag, and a month later was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. [Read more…] about A Little-Known Civil War Hero From The Catskills