Readers: I will be blogging about people who appear in my upcoming book, When People Were Things, but include here different stories than are in the book.
Attack against Fort Sumter, 1861, Currier & Ives
On April 12, 1861, the South Carolina militia fired from shore on the Union garrison of Fort Sumter in the Charleston Harbor. The Battle of Fort Sumter were the first shots fired that sparked the Civil War. Days later, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 militia men into national service for 90 days to put down the Southern insurrection.
The Northern response among the free states was wildly enthusiastic. War fever took hold. Whereas Lincoln has asked the Indiana governor for 6 regiments, the governor offered 12. At the onset of the war, Washingtonians bit their nails, so nakedly exposed to danger, as neighbor Virginia (to the west) joined the Confederacy and Marylanders (to the north and east) in Baltimore viciously attacked Union troops on their way to defend the federal capital.
The influx of the militia corps took the U.S. War Department by surprise. The new Union soldiers needed food, uniforms, mattresses, blankets, stove, cooking utensils, weapons, tents, knapsacks, overcoats, hammocks, bags, and cots on a massive scale.(1) For starters, where were the soldiers flooding into Washington, D.C. to camp? Massachusetts militia men, the first to arrive, found quarters in the Capitol, where the top of the unfinished wooden dome had been left off for ventilation The men of the First Rhode Island Regiment found quarters inside the U.S. Patent Office, spreading their bunks beside the “cabinets of curiosities.” (2)
The Rhode Islanders sleep alongside models submitted with patent applications, causing much damage, and tremendous broken glass.
(1) Leech, Margaret. Reveille in Washington, 86.
(2) Ibid, 83.
Lisa's History Room 
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