Countdown to Halloween: War Wounds

Today, a Halloween story from Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine in 1870, in which the emerging holiday touches upon the trauma of the Civil War and the project of reunion.

Our Library Table: Debby Applegate's The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

Henry and Harriet

I've been reading Debby Applegate's The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher in stolen moments (so, slowly). It's a compelling read, all told, and totally illuminating at points. I knew a little bit about Beecher (the adultery bit, mainly, thanks to Twain's satellite relationship to the Beechers in Hartford) and had an inkling that I wanted to know more. This proved to be a great place to start, pointing the way to a number of paths that I'll be following in the months to come.

"Poor little Nellie Grant" and the Wedding of the Century

Nellie Grant, Algernon Sartoris (via)

Last year I took part in some filming for an episode of Heir Hunters, the BBC's genealogy / fortune-hunting reality-documentary show. Rather delightfully, the trail in this particular case led back to Nellie Grant, daughter of President Ulysses S. Grant, who married English rotter Algernon Sartoris at the White House in 1874 - and that's what I was brought in to talk about. The episode aired today and should be available here. It tells this remarkable story very nicely. But I thought it would also be interesting to share some of the primary source material that I uncovered during the course of my research for the episode - of which there's no shortage. This relationship made a large impact in Gilded Age America, and left an equally large footprint. While it's probably pretty banal to point out how contemporary the story feels, I still find it remarkable how much detail about this Transatlantic wedding - and the unhappy marriage that resulted - can be traced in the popular press, in the correspondence of the great and the good, and even in the literary history of the period. Celebrity wedding of the nineteenth century? I think it has a good claim to that title. What follows are a few highlights.

"Shut in from all the world without": John Greenleaf Whittier's Snow-Bound, A Winter Idyll (1866)

(Frontispiece to the first edition, available here)

There's a dusting of snow on the ground, which is excuse enough to return to the delights of John Greenleaf Whittier's Snow-Bound, A Winter Idyll (1866).

Countdown to Halloween: "'Twas the Night of All Hallows", Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1865

It's the first Halloween after the Civil War - and is a changing Halloween sensibility discernible in the way that the Brooklyn Daily Eagle marked the day?

Countdown to Halloween: The Civil War

"Jeff Davis Reaping the Harvest", Harper's Weekly, October 26, 1861 (via Library of Congress)

Halloween during the Civil War: where real and imaginary horrors meet.

Reading the Fall of New Orleans

William Waud, "Landing of Captain Bailey and Lieutenant Perkins on the Levee, New Orleans [. . .] to Demand the Surrender of the City", from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated History of the Civil War (New York: Mrs. Frank Leslie, 1895)

A century and a half ago, Confederate New Orleans was on the brink of surrendering to a Union naval force under the command of David Glasgow Farragut. As well as being a pivotal episode in the Civil War, it was a moment that left a rich literary record.

American Scrapbook

This seems like a good place to start.