Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #USCivilWar
Most recents (5)
Lafayette Square by The White House #WashingtonDC – honors #AmericanRevolution heroes #Lafayette, #Rochambeau, Von Steuben and Kosciuszko. In 1859, adulterer Congressman Daniel Sickles murdered adulterer Philip Barton Key (Francis Scott Key’s son)... 1/ 
2/ Lafayette Square: … over Sickles’ adulteress wife Teresa DaPonte Bagioli Sickles (1836-1867), who he had married when she was 15/16. [Key died in the white home in the background, known as President McKinley's Little White House.]
3/ Lafayette Square: … Sickles was the first to be acquitted using the “temporary insanity” defense and stayed on as a Congressman. He later became a #USCivilWar #MedalOfHonor war hero at #Gettysburg. Continued...
#OTD in 1865 Charleston, South Carolina Mayor Charles Macbeth surrendered the city to Lieutenant Colonel A.G. Bennett of the 21st United States Colored Troops. The city had been under siege since the summer of 1863 and its harbor contained Ft. Sumter, where the war began.
Confederate General Beauregard ordered the evacuation three days earlier, nearly four years after he commanded the initial assault of Ft. Sumter in April, 1861. By the afternoon a company of the 54th Mass. (USCT) was helping to extinguish the flames set by the retreating rebels.
Many of the first Union soldiers to enter Charleston were from the USCT and they left a wake of liberation for Black Charlestonians who were legally enslaved the day prior. Days later the 55th Mass. (USCT) walked the streets of downtown singing "John Brown's Body."
#OTD in 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment passed the House of Representatives, sending it to the states for ratification. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States “…except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
The amendment ended race-based chattel slavery in America, but did not rid the nation of forced labor, which exists through America’s prison system today. #13thAmendment #Constitution #slavery #HistoryMatters #CivilWar #USCivilWar #AmericanCivilWar #PoliticalHistory #knowhistory
Congress abolished slavery in Washington D.C. in 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation outlawed slavery in rebelling states Jan. 1, 1863 and former rebel states were forced to ban slavery in new state constitutions. Republicans in Congress still wanted a Constitutional Amendment.
#OTD in 1861 a fugitive enslaved person named Sara Lucy Bagby became the last person to be returned to their owner under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is unclear when Bagby was born but she was sold in January of 1852 in Richmond to John Goshorn for $600 dollars.
Bagby (More commonly known as Lucy), escaped to Ohio via the Underground Railroad in 1860 and settled in Cleveland. For a short time, she worked as a domestic servant for Republican congressman Albert G. Riddle and as a jeweler
She was arrested on January 19, 1861 and was returned to Goshorn on the 24th. However, After the Emancipation Proclamation in early 1863, Bagby made her way to Pittsburgh, married a man named George Johnson, and relocated with him to Cleveland. Bagby died on July 14th, 1906.
#OTD in 1848 gold was found at Sutter’s Mill, California. This spurred the California Gold Rush, as northern Free-Soilers and pro-slavery Southerners both flocked to the new territory acquired through the Mexican-American War. #OnThisDay #OnThisDate #TodayInHistory #GoldRush
The battle over California’s fate as a free or slave state ignited intense debate in Congress, deepening the divide between the free North and the slave South. #California #Slavery #CaliforniaHistory
The prospect of a free California threatened to upset the even balance between free and slave states, something that southern slaveholders were unwilling to accept without certain concessions. The issue was temporarily resolved through the Compromise of 1850.
