TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Since we are honoring presidents today we might take a moment of two to do it with spirit(s). The two whose birthdays fall near today—George Washington and Abe Lincoln—both liked to imbibe a wee dram now and again. Washington even made it and was by some accounts at one time the largest distiller in the […]

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Truly nothing is sacred to metal thieves, not even Abe Lincoln. Thieves have nabbed a 3-foot-long copper sword atop Lincoln’s Tomb in what is believed to be the first theft at the site in more than a century. An employee noticed last week that the sword was cut from a statue of a Civil War […]

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The venerable Scientific American magazine has its archives on line now, all the way back to the first issue in 1845. Normally it would cost you money to look, but for November only they have the 1845-1908 archives available for free. Unfortunately there is no universal search for these early issues altho you can search […]

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Anyone looking for a laugh today (or an example of hyperbole) should check Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s pronouncements today—that the Republicans are “in rebellion” for not supporting President Obama’s jobs bill, just like the Confederacy. President Obama tends to idealize — and rightfully so  — Abraham Lincoln, who looked at states in rebellion and he […]

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In the wake of the recent shootings in Arizona, Wired magazine looks at at a Secret Service study on the motivations of assassins. Although they vary, politics plays a surprisingly small role. Contrary to popular assumptions about public killings, the attackers didn’t conform to any particular demographic profile. But when Fein reconstructed their patterns of […]

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Scott Johnson of Powerline blog has a post commemorating the birth of Abraham Lincoln today. He quotes Lincoln’s famous 1858 “house divided” speech, calling it “one of the most incendiary speeches in American history;” one that propelled the prairie lawyer to the White House. Maybe so (it was perceived differently at the time), but it […]

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What were the consequences of the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid? In operational terms, not much. Casualties were minimal and the raid accomplished little. The indirect consequences, however, were important. For one, it convinced the Confederates to strengthen Richmond’s defenses and move their POWs away from the capital, thus removing a tempting target for raids. The biggest fallout […]

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