Vicksburg - April, 1863

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday April 30, 2014 · 6:00 AM PDT

2014/04/30 · 06:00

WEDNESDAY APRIL 1, 1863
April’s Fools day, 1863, marked a new beginning for the American Civil War. The first draft in American history went into effect in the North, and all males between 20 and 45 years of age were required to register for the draft. However, you could buy an exemption for $300 (equal to over $6,000 today), or pay someone to serve for you. The war was becoming increasingly unpopular in the the North. In July the draft would lead to riots in New York City (above) that would only be brought under control with Federal troops.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday April 27, 2014 · 6:00 AM PDT

2014/04/27 · 06:00

I shall now relate the most most amazing military campaign in American history. This is the story of U.S. Grant’s capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi. And I will begin with the observation of an amateur military genius who was involved in the planning of the operation. Abraham Lincoln tried to explain the importance of Vicksburg to those celebrating the capture of Memphis, Tennessee. He told them, “…Vicksburg is the key. Here is the Red River, which will supply the Confederacy with cattle and corn to feed their armies. There are the Arkansas and White Rivers which can supply cattle and hogs by the thousand. From Vicksburg these supplies can be distributed by rail all over the Confederacy….Let us get Vicksburg and all that country is ours. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pockets…." I have never found a more cogent and accurate description of the military situation in the winter of 1862, than that.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday April 25, 2014 · 6:00 AM PDT

2014/04/25 · 06:00

I came across a great story about an enterprising San Francisco merchant who scattered $20 worth of gold dust on the cobblestones of a public street, and was sweeping it up and panning it out in a horse trough just as a boatload of eager new 49ers arrived from “The States”. To them it seemed the streets of San Francisco really were paved with gold. The shop keeper even helpfully directed the newcomers to a nearby store where they could begin getting rich by obtaining their own twenty cent prospecting pan - for a mere $15.00 each. The new arrivals bought every pan in the store, and the merchant got rich. It's a myth of course, but not by much. The Frisco store was owned by Sam Brannan (above). And in nine short weeks in 1848 this alcoholic womanizer sold enough mining pans and picks and shovels out of his Frisco and Sacramento stores to profit the modern equivalent of $9 million. And he used that fortune, and four lengths of rope, to grab as much power as quickly as he could.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday April 20, 2014 · 6:00 AM PDT

2014/04/20 · 06:00

I find it perfectly logical that so much began in Florence. Wool from Europe and dyes from Asian ports met in Tuscany, which was far enough from Rome that religious strictures against profits could be stretched, and in a region so poor the nobility, the only people with any money, were willing to experiment with capitalism. A cultural and economic “rinascità”, or renaissance was set off. And riding the first wave in 1378 was Salvestro de'Medici, a black sheep of his clan.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday April 18, 2014 · 6:01 AM PDT

2014/04/18 · 06:01

I don't believe the rumors of a plan to poison Lorenzo and Guiliano de Medici in their family villa on the sun warmed slopes of Fiesole, four miles above Florence. First, how was the poison to be administered? If a member of the Medici staff had been subverted, why wait for the banquet in honor of Cardinal Raphael Riario, when everyone was on high alert, with enemies in their home? And poison was an uncertain weapon. It might merely sicken the victims. It seems likely to me the banquet was used to lull the Medici and their allies into complacency, and set the stage for the actual assassination to take place the next day, Easter Sunday, 26 April of 1478, inside the Basilica of Maria del Fiore.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday April 16, 2014 · 6:00 AM PDT

2014/04/16 · 06:00

I believe the bloody Easter Sunday murder in a crowded Tuscany church was set in motion twenty-five years earlier, in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman empire. The loss of Byzantine middle men tripled the price Christians had to pay for a volcanic rock called alunite, used in tanning animal skins and fixing dyes into cloth. The resulting inflation threatened to blow up the entire European economy. So the Catholic church was over joyed when eight years later, a huge source of alunite was discovered in the Tolfa Mountains, just 50 miles north of Rome. Pope Pius II quickly annexed the mountainous region into his own Papal States, and immediately leased the mineral rights to the people who could pay him the most, the Vatican bankers, the House of Medici.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday April 13, 2014 · 6:00 AM PDT

2014/04/13 · 06:00

I will tell you, Neal Dow was the worst type of politician - a true believer. If you travel long enough down any philosophical path you always reach the land of ad nauseum. But the true believer will never admit that such a place exists in their philosophy. So having reached ad nauseum this spiritual Puritan in Quaker garb, this five foot two inch tall Napoleon of Temperance, this two term Mayor of Portland, Maine, Neal S. Dow, could never find his way back to sanity. Even the Rum Riot of 1855 failed to convince Mayor Dow that his own blindness had set the cause of sobriety in America back by a generation.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday April 09, 2014 · 6:00 AM PDT

2014/04/09 · 06:00

I can see him clearly, as if he was standing next to me at this moment. And yet his image remains hazy. According to his drivers' license, he was five feet, nine inches tall, weighed 150 pounds and had gray hair. He was also described as “ ...a slight hollow-chested man”, of 46, with thin lips. And yet he remains an enigma. A neighbor, when shown several photographs of him, said, “ "I knew him well and he never looked like that.” And he was not just a physical enigma. Howard Kittle, the Clinton County agent and Farm Bureau manager, received a letter from him, and admitted that if anyone else had written it “I would have thought sure he was insane.'” But that was before - when he was an elected community leader, a trusted guardian of the communities' wealth and its future. Afterward - the Clinton County Republican-News was forced to wonder, “Is the building of a modern institution which equips children to meet the problems of the world a burden - or is it a privilege?” You see, the man at issue was a anti-tax warrior and an American narcissist.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday April 09, 2014 · 6:00 AM PDT

2014/04/09 · 06:00

I can’t think of a single love triangle that turned out productively for the participants, from King David who did not let morality stand between him and separating Bathsheba from her husband, Uriah the Hittite, through King Arthur, who let morality prevent him from separating his beloved Guinevere from her lusted after Lancelot, through the swelled egos of John Edwards, Elizabeth Edwards and Rielle Hunter, and winding down the Appalachian Trail with the romantically addled Maria Belen Chapur, Jenny Sanford and the man in the middle, Governor Mark Sanford. And the “ménage-a-fools” between “Big” Jim Fisk, Josie Mansfield and Edward Stokes repeated the same sad story, with an unfortunate familiar final twist.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday April 06, 2014 · 6:01 AM PDT

2014/04/06 · 06:01

I can't make my mind up about Schuyler Colfax (above). Was he a crooked, intriguing politician, as a wise man once said, or was he a working class hero who rose to the second highest office in the land by his own honest efforts? As the media types like to prattle, he had an appealing story. He entered this world in New York City, heir to a prominent family name, but his father had died of tuberculosis five months before he was born. That made the infant and his mother Evelyn, a burden on the family. In November of 1836 she married an ambitious widower, 24 year old George W. Mathews. The following summer Mathew's moved his new wife, his 11 year old stepson and his own daughter by train and canal boat to the the glacier-washed flat lands of northern Indiana, along the Michigan border. Mathews opened a general store in the village of New Carlisle, but his real interest was politics. Three years later, in 1841, he was elected on the Whig Party ticket as auditor of St. Joseph County. So he moved the family again, to the county seat, at the south bend of the St. Joseph River - South Bend, Indiana. Fifteen year old Schuyler was hired as his stepfather's deputy.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday April 04, 2014 · 6:00 AM PDT

2014/04/04 · 06:00

I find the two mysteries tragically familiar. It was after midnight, Sunday March eighth, local time when the Boeing jet roared down Kulara Lampur's runway 14 left , before heading north toward the Gulf of Thailand. And it was just about midnight Tuesday July Second, Greenwich Mean Time, when the Lockheed Electra lifted off the grass airfield twelve time zones east of Greenwich, in the center of the village of Lae, Papua New Guinea, before climbing eastward out over the Solomon Sea.

KAMuston

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday April 02, 2014 · 6:00 AM PDT

2014/04/02 · 06:00

I have been in love and been stupid. You have been in love and been as stupid as members of this "triangle of delinquency" in our story. Or you will be. It is part of the human condition to be in love and be this stupid at least once in your life. And there is even little shame in being this stupid twice. And although Edward Stokes had the opportunity to break free from his love sick stupidity when the judge threw out his arrest for embezzlement in early 1871, he did not. He could not. And there was no excuse for being that stupid. Like a Tom Cat with his eyes locked on a caged bird, Edward Stokes had lost what the Hindus refer to as his third eye - the ability to see himself from afar, detached from the emotion of the moment. Edward Stokes was in love with Josie Mansfield, and love makes you stupid. But Edward and Josie were also in love with money. And greed makes you doubly stupid. And that made made all three members of our triangle, triple threats.

Newer
Older

RSS

Vicksburg - April, 1863

VICKSBURG The Beginning

GOD, GOLD AND ROPE

EASTER SUNDAY Pt Three

EASTER SUNDAY PT. TWO

Easter Sunday Pt One

TRUE BELIEVER

American Narcissist

Eternal Triangle Pt Three

The Smiler

Missing Plane

Eternal Triangle Pt Two