While three years of fragmentation have brought little healing between North and South, there are growing signs that reconciliation is possible, evidenced in a surprisingly positive response–from certain states in the South–to U. S. Abraham Lincoln‘s four month-old offer of amnesty and reconstruction. Yet even within the glimmers of reconciliation remains a stark reality: the…
In Louisiana, Union forces continue their campaign up the Red River, placing ever more pressure on Confederate forces in the area. Meanwhile, in the Eastern theater of war, the 102nd Illinois Regiment moves out from Lookout Valley, straddling the Tennessee and Georgia state lines, on a scouting expedition southwest-ward to Deer Head Cove, Georgia, near…
John R. Bowles, born June 13, 1826 in Lynchburg, Virginia, is a free black and a Baptist minister. As a young man, Bowles settled near Chillicothe in Ross County, Ohio, marrying Sarah Jane Bryant in 1848. There the couple grew their family, in addition to participating in the Underground Railroad. At thirty years of age,…