Sarah Wakefield

Indian Captive in Minnesota

Wakefield was one of over 100 white women and children who were captured along the Minnesota River in the Dakota War in the late summer and early fall of 1862. Wakefield spent six weeks living among the Mdewakanton Dakota, often in danger from those who felt captives should be killed, but a brave named Chaska intervened on her behalf.

The Dakota War
In the years prior to the Civil War, relations between the Dakota people and white settlers had deteriorated considerably. The Dakota had been pushed into a narrow strip of reservation land along the Minnesota River. Once the Civil War began, already scarce resources were further strained, and the supplies promised to the Dakota in a "a series of broken peace treaties" were no longer available.

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Sarah Bush Lincoln

Stepmother of Abraham Lincoln

Sarah Bush Lincoln (December 13, 1788 - April 12, 1869) was the second wife of Thomas Lincoln and stepmother of Abraham Lincoln. While Lincoln's relationship with his father appeared to be strained, he remained close to his stepmother after he left home to make his way in the world. After becoming a successful attorney in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln saved his family's land from forced sale.

Childhood and Early Years
Sarah Bush was born in Hardin County, Kentucky, on December 13, 1788. She was one of three daughters of Christopher and Hannah Bush. The Bush family consisted of nine children. The male children were William, Samuel, Isaac, Elijah, Christopher and John. The female children were Hannah, Rachel and Sarah. By the time Sarah was two years old, the family had moved to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where Sarah grew up.

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Belle Starr

Bandit Queen of the American West?

Belle Starr was a Confederate sympathizer and supposedly a notorious outlaw of the American West. She has been credited with a long list of spectacular crimes, but it appears that she might have done little more than traffic in stolen horses, bribe law enforcement officers and provide a haven for her outlaw friends.

Image: Belle Starr Monument
At the Woolaroc Museum
Woolaroc, Oklahoma

Belle Starr was born Myra Maybelle Shirley on February 5, 1848 on a farm near Carthage, Missouri. Her parents, John and Eliza Shirley, called their daughter Belle. The Shirleys had moved to Missouri in 1839, and had become wealthy raising wheat, corn, horses and livestock. In 1856, they sold their land and moved his family into Carthage, where they built an inn, a tavern, livery stable and blacksmith shop - taking up almost an entire city block.

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Cynthia Ann Parker

Indian Captive in the Civil War Era

Cynthia Ann Parker after being
returned to the Parker family

Cynthia Ann Parker (circa 1825-1870) was kidnapped and adopted by the Comanche at the age of nine, and lived with them for 24 years. She married chief Peta Nocona and had three children with him, including Quanah Parker, the last free roaming chief of the Comanches. She was "rescued" at age 34, and spent the remaining years of her life refusing to adjust to life in white society.

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Salisbury Bread Riot

Citizen Protest During the Civil War

In the western Piedmont of North Carolina, residents of the town of Salisbury and Rowan County developed a work ethic and political values that were consciously in opposition to the perceived life of leisure practiced by the eastern planter class. Westerners valued hard labor and self-sufficiency. In the predominantly yeoman countryside, this self-reliant attitude meant that the bulk of labor was done not by slaves but by family members.

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Bennett Place

Confederate Surrender in North Carolina

At Bennett Place Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston (left center) and Union General William Tecumseh Sherman (right center) met in the waning days of the Civil War to formally end hostilities.

Image: The First Meeting

On April 15, 2010, Bennett Place State Historic Site unveiled this 44" X 64" oil painting by Civil War artist Dan Nance, which captures the moment of that meeting is captured in Nance's oil painting. "Johnston was neat and proud. Sherman had been traveling a lot and was muddy and untidy. The painting captures that, and the Bennett house nearby," says Nance.

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Lucy Lambert Hale

Fiancee of Lincoln Assassin John Wilkes Booth

In 1862, Lucy Lambert Hale began a romantic relationship with famous stage actor John Wilkes Booth. Another of her admirers was Robert Todd Lincoln, eldest son of President Abraham Lincoln.

Lucy Lambert Hale was born January 1, 1841, in Dover, New Hampshire, the second eldest daughter of John Parker Hale and Lucy Hill Lambert Hale. John Parker Hale served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1843 to 1845 and in the U.S. Senate from 1847 to 1853 and again from 1855 to 1865. Lucy was described as pretty, precocious, sweet and good.

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Vicksburg National Military Park

The most impressive of the memorials at Vicksburg National Military Park is the Illinois Monument, which was modeled after the Roman Pantheon. On its walls are 60 bronze tablets which record the names of the 36,325 Illinois soldiers who participated in the Vicksburg campaign. The Shirley House, to the right of the monument, is the only building in the park that survived the siege.

Vicksburg National Military Park encompasses over 1800 acres along sixteen miles of road. There are more than 1300 monuments, tablets, and plaques commemorating individuals and units. In addition, it includes the exhibit and museum of the U.S.S. Cairo gunboat, 3 river batteries, Grant's canal in Louisiana, and the headquarters of the Confederate Commander, General John Pemberton.

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Letitia Burwell

Civil War Civilian

Letitia Burwell was born on a plantation in Virginia and spent most of her life in the rural regions of that state. Her book, A Girl's life in Virginia Before the War (1895), records her memories of the antebellum South. Burwell's descriptions of life on the plantation are filled with pastoral scenes of a wealthy Virginia family engaged in the daily pleasures of their time.

Burwell recalls tales and stories passed down from neighbors and family members that she feels epitomize the quality of life in the South. She tells of social dances, food, the relationships that her family had with their slaves and life among family members.

She defends the South against the criticism by outside observers. Burwell also observes that in some ways life in the antebellum South, even for slaves, was better than life in many parts of England, France and the rest of the world.

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Judith Carter Henry

First Civilian Casualty of the Civil War

At first, Americans viewed the American Civil War romantically, as a great adventure. To many, it was a crusade of sorts that would be decided quickly, and would return both the North and South to a peaceful way of life, either as one nation or two. But events near the small Virginia community of Manassas Junction would change all that.

Image: Ruins of Henry House after the Battle of Manassas

The importance of the First Battle of Bull Run, or Manassas as it was generally known in the South, lay not so much in the movement of the armies or the strategic territory gained or lost, but shocked the nation into the realization that the war might prove longer and more costly than anyone could have imagined – not only to the armies, but to the nation as a whole.

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Women and Girls in the Brown's Island Explosion

The Confederate States Laboratories (CSL) was located on Brown's Island in the James River in Virginia. The brainchild of Confederate ordnance chief Colonel Josiah Gorgas, the CSL made small arms and ammunition for the Confederate Army.

Image: Monument to the Victims of the Explosion

This gray granite marker now stands beside the gazebo in Richmond's Oakwood Cemetery. The names of those who perished and their ages are engraved on the back.

Because most of Richmond's men were serving their country at the front, women and children were the bulk of the workforce at CSL, from the age of twelve to sixty. Their hands were small and well suited to assembling cartridges, fuses, caps, and primers for the Confederate army. Working at peak efficiency, even a child as young as nine could turn out up to 1200 cartridges per day.

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Mary Surratt

Accused Conspirator in the Lincoln Assassination

Mary Elizabeth Jenkins was born in May or June of 1823 near Waterloo, Maryland. She had two brothers. Her father died when she was two years old. Mary was then enrolled at a private girl's boarding school, Academy for Young Ladies, in Alexandria Virginia.

She married John Harrison Surratt in 1839, when she was sixteen and he was twenty-seven. The couple lived on lands that John had inherited from his foster parents, the Neales, in what is now a section of Washington DC known as Congress Heights. They had three children.

In 1851, a fire destroyed their home. The couple bought a farm and established a tavern and later a post office. The tavern was in operation by the fall of 1852, and by 1853 the family was living in the newly-built Surratt House and Tavern.

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Virginia Clay

Southern Belle and Wife of Confederate Senator Clement Clay

Virginia Tunstall was born in 1825 in Nash County, North Carolina, the daughter of a doctor. Her mother died when she was very young, and her father left her upbringing to his wife's family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Virginia graduated from the Female Academy at Nashville, Tennessee in 1840.

Image: Virginia Clay before the Civil War

In 1843, she returned to Tuscaloosa, where she met a newly-elected member of the Alabama Senate, Clement Clay, Jr. Virginia married Clement Clay after courting for only a month, and moved with Clay to his home in Huntsville, Alabama. Virginia gave birth to their only child in 1853, and it died in infancy.

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Lucy Pickens

Lucy Holcombe was born on June 11, 1832, on the Holcombe cotton plantation named 'Woodstock' near LaGrange, Tennessee, not far from where the Battle of Shiloh would be fought 30 years later. She was the second of five children. Both of her parents were well-educated.

Image: Lucy Holcombe Pickens in her 20s

The Holcombes sent their two daughters, Anna and Lucy, to study at a Quaker school, Moravian Seminary for Women, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. But Lucy's father lost everything when he staked his farm and his money on a horse race. In 1850, the family moved to Marshall, Texas.

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Anna Jarvis

Founder of Mother's Day

Anna Marie Jarvis is the founder of the Mother's Day holiday in the United States. Her birthplace, known as the Anna Jarvis House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. It was built in 1854 and is a two story, frame dwelling, which is also notable as General George B. McClellan's first field headquarters during his 1861 western Virginia campaign.


Ann Reeves Jarvis and daughter Anna Marie Jarvis

Anna Marie Jarvis was born May 1, 1864, in Webster, West Virginia, the ninth of eleven children born to Reverend Granville and Ann Reeves Jarvis. The family moved to nearby Grafton when Anna was a year old. In 1881, she enrolled at the Augusta Female Academy in Staunton, Virginia, now Mary Baldwin College, graduating in 1883. Anna then returned to Grafton and taught school for seven years.

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Civil War Christmas

Merry Christmas General Lee
By Mort Kunstler
December 25, 1862
It was a passing moment of cheer amid the harsh realities of war. General Robert E. Lee attended a holiday dinner hosted by General Stonewall Jackson at his winter headquarters at Moss Neck Plantation near Fredericksburg, Virginia. General Lee is leaving the warmth of the dinner, heading back to his headquarters.

During the Civil War Christmas was celebrated in both the United States and the Confederate States of America although the day was not recognized until 1870, when President Ulysses S. Grant made Christmas an official Federal holiday in an attempt to unite north and south. The war continued to rage on Christmas Day and skirmishes occurred throughout the country.

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Civil War Thanksgiving

The first Thanksgiving dinner was held by the Pilgrims in October 1621, as a harvest festival in Plymouth Colony. President George Washington declared a day of Thanksgiving for the new nation in 1789, and another in 1795.

Thanksgiving in Camp
Drawing by Alfred R. Waud
Thursday November 28, 1861

But our national day of Thanksgiving came not from the Pilgrims, but from President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and from Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of a popular women's magazine, Godey’s Lady's Book. For 40 years Hale had written editorials and letters to governors and presidents, trying to have Thanksgiving declared a holiday.

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Louisa Volker

Louisa Volker became a Union telegrapher in Missouri during the Civil War. Her intelligence activities put her at risk of capture because Confederate raiders in the area often kidnapped the local telegrapher when they invaded a town, and forced him to intercept messages from, or send false reports to, the enemy.

Louisa Volker was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1838, the daughter of German immigrants. Her father Emanuel Volker was a grocer. Louisa had an older sister, two younger sisters and a brother.

 In the 1840s, Emanuel Volker purchased land in the city of St. Louis and surrounding counties. In the 1850s, the female members of the family, including Louisa, participated in these land transactions. It was very unusual during that era for women to own property. The Volkers were fairly prosperous during the decades leading up to the Civil War.

Around 1860, the family moved from St. Louis to Mineral Point, where Mr. Volker was listed as a tavern keeper in the 1860 census. Louisa, then 22 years of age, was still residing with her parents.

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Emma Sansom

Confederate Heroine from Alabama

Emma Sansom was living on her family's farm near Gadsden, Alabama in the spring of 1863. the Sansom household consisted of Emma's widowed mother, sister Jennie, 24, brother Rufus, 22, recuperating from wounds he had received in battle, and Emma, 15. She was described as an attractive young girl, with blue eyes and auburn hair.

Image: To the Lost Ford
By John Paul Strain
Emma Sansom and General Forrest

In April 1863, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his cavalrymen entered northern Alabama to pursue Union General Abel Streight, who was on a raid to destroy the Confederate railroad near Chattanooga, the only source of supply and communications to General Braxton Bragg's army in middle Tennessee.

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