Since acquiring the Republican Journal in May 1858, William H. Simpson had unabashedly shared his political opinions with his readers in Belfast and elsewhere. Thundering against Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party, emancipation, and blacks since late 1862, he vehemently opposed the Civil War in a city committed to Union victory. And now the Lincoln Administration […]
Discipline held some 200 departing soldiers in their ranks at Steamboat Landing at Belfast on Monday, May 20, 1861 — but tears still flowed. Scrambling that spring to form infantry regiments, Maine Governor Israel Washburn Jr and Maine Adjutant General John Hodsdon created Nos. 1 through 6 by blending existing militia companies with newly recruited […]
As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, many Americans who were then older than ages 7 or 8 can recall where they were upon learning that terrorists had flown hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Besides killing 3,000 people, that attack launched a 20-year war that America lost on August 31, […]
You’ve probably heard this joke: “A lawyer and a snake are lying run over in the road. What’s the difference between them?” Answer: “There are brake marks over the snake.” The lawyer joke circulating in Lewiston, Maine in autumn 1862 went something like this: “What do you call a copperhead lawyer tossed into jail?” Answer: […]
Having printed the Emancipation Proclamation in its entirety and without acerbic commentary in the January 9, 1863 edition of his Republican Journal, publisher William H. Simpson understood that an influx of black soldiers would buttress the Union’s battle- and disease-thinned ranks. More Union soldiers and sailors meant more military pressure applied to Confederate defenders already […]
A Phippsburg officer learned the hard way that shooting his mouth off about presidential policy (i.e., the Emancipation Proclamation) was a real bad idea. William H. Wheeler, publisher of the Bangor-based Daily Whig & Courier, reported on January 2, 1863 that “there are now three regiments of colored troops and 150 [men in a] heavy […]
Given the opportunity to join the looters pillaging shattered Fredericksburg in Virginia, the respectable Dr. Nahum P. Monroe grabbed what plunder he could. And he admitted that he had done so. Well after sunset on Monday, Dec. 15, 1862, Monroe (the chief surgeon of the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment) rousted at least 20-25 wounded Union […]
Confederate artillery shells whistling overhead, nearby explosions shaking the damaged house in which a senior Union officer had placed a field hospital, Army surgeons amputated shattered limbs, sewed blood-spurting arteries, and, between patients, wiped blood-covered hands on blood-pocked aprons. Sometimes Dr. Nahum P. Monroe, the senior surgeon of the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment, stood, […]
BELFAST — A course offered this month at Senior College of Belfast will examine the Civil War’s impact on Belfast civilians — and civil liberties, especially those pertaining to a local newspaper editor arrested and charged with treason in 1864. The course, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War,” takes its name […]
On Flag Day 2011, Susan and I traveled to Belfast to meet a bonafide Civil War veteran, the city’s last, that had arrived home from the war only a few months earlier. And if cloth could only talk, what a tale this veteran could tell. The veteran is a quilt, specifically the Belfast Civil War […]
