Today is an appointed National Day of Thanksgiving in the United States, the second official annual holiday that in the years to come is known simply as Thanksgiving. Union battlefield successes in 1863 led President Abraham Lincoln to set aside the last Thursday in November as an official holiday of national thanksgiving, and further military…
Elijah J. Marrs today enlists in Company L, 12 U.S. Colored Artillery. The story of how Marrs arrives at this moment is quite remarkable. Marrs was born January 1840 in Shelby County, Kentucky, to a free black father and an enslaved mother. Since his mother was a slave, Elijah was born into slavery. “Where I…
Today in the Second Battle of Dalton (Georgia), Confederate cavalry under the command of Major General Joseph Wheeler, in the midst of a campaign to disrupt Union supply lines north of besieged Atlanta, demand the surrender of the town’s Union garrison. The Federals refuse, driving off the Rebels by day’s end. A detachment of United…