Footnote Blog » us civil war

A Civil War mystery: Whose Father Was He?

Chris Willis — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:36:36 +0000

Errol Morris has posted the fourth of five installments of “Whose Father Was He?” — a riveting investigation into a photograph of three children found in the hands of the dead body of Amos Humiston, a fallen Union soldier, at Gettysburg in 1863.

You can see him and his family in the 1860 US Census or view his Page.

President’s Day Reading

Chris Willis — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:14:38 +0000

Photo: Chris Willis, 2007

A Bad Rebel

Donna — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:32:24 +0000

Hi! I’m Donna and I’ve worked at Footnote for over a year. Part of what I do is write Story Pages and other miscellany. Here is my Footnote profile.

I found this interesting recommendation when I was annotating in the Confederate Amnesty Papers. The Governor of Tennessee wrote, in behalf of John Russell’s application for amnesty, that he was an old man and a bad rebel. He continued that Russell “had been badly whipped and has not long to live.” You can see the entire case free here.

Remembering the Monitor

Peter — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:22:21 +0000

I read an interesting article recently about the new USS Monitor Center at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia. The USS Monitor, and the Monitor Class ships that came after it, played an important roll in the Civil War and in the history of naval combat. The article does a nice job discussing the history of the ship and the new exhibits at the museum.

I was particularly interested in the article because a few weeks back I was playing around the search on Footnote and did a quick search for “monitor” in the Matthew Brady collection of Civil War Photos as a test. I found some great images (over 30 of them) of ships and their crews.

It was interesting to see the differences between the various incarnations of the Monitors and to see the way the decks of the ships were used. Here are a few examples:

This one has a single (and smaller) turret, a tall thin smoke stack and a cannon and any number of other accouterments attached to the deck.

Here’s another single turret example, the Sangus, but it’s quite different from the example above with a larger turret, stockier pipe and what looks like equipment for clearing the water in front of the ship. There are even pictures of her officers and crew.

Here’s another one where they pulled out all the stops, double turrets, tents, lifeboat hangers, flags, you name it.