Colonel Strong Vincent and the Epic Struggle for Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg: Part II - “Don’t Yield an Inch!”

A 26-year-old Union brigade commander risked being court-martialed when, without orders, he rushed his four regiments to the summit of an undefended hill at a crucial moment during the Battle of Gettysburg. The Harvard graduate’s valor may have saved the Army of the Potomac – but it cost him his life. Timothy M. Gay explains – in part 2 of 2 he looks at how it ended.

Part 1 on the soil of old Pennsylvania is here.

Statue of Strong Vincent at Blasco Library in Erie, Pennsylvania. Source: Pat Noble, photograph taken by self on May 4, 2007, via Wikimedia Commons here, and licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

It took the red (First Division), white (Second Division), and blue (Third Division) Maltese Cross-men of the Fifth Corps the entire night to march to Gettysburg. Famished and spent, they didn’t arrive at the Union camp at Powers Hill, a mile behind the Federal center on Cemetery Ridge and about a mile and a quarter removed from the northeastern edge of the smaller of the two round tops, until around seven o’clock on July 2nd, a couple of hours after dawn.

They were told to eat breakfast and try to catch up on sleep. As the day wore on, the commotion on the far side of the high ground ebbed and flowed – at times nearly deafening, at other times strangely quiet.

Along with rest of the corps, Strong Vincent’s Third Brigade was put in a swing position; depending on how the battle transpired, General Sykes’s men could either be sent to support General Daniel Sickles’s Third Corps to their southwest or General Henry Slocum’s Twelfth Corps to their northwest. Since late afternoon the previous day, Sickles’s men had been anchoring the Army of the Potomac’s left flank, the southern “eye” of its upside-down fishhook defensive line. Slocum’s men, meanwhile, had been assigned the area surrounding Culp’s Hill, the hook’s northeastern “bend.”  

The Federals owed their possession of Gettysburg’s high ground to the guile and cunning of cavalry commander John Buford. On Tuesday, June 30th, the day before the battle began, General Buford was on a reconnaissance patrol to assess the exact whereabouts of the Confederate forces and determine the best ground on which the Army of the Potomac should wage its fight. As soon as he rode through town, Buford recognized the strategic value of the ridges and hills that formed Gettysburg’s southern and eastern sides. Surmising that the Rebels would consolidate their troops and attack the next day from the north and west, Buford positioned his soldiers some three miles in front of the high ground. Once the shooting starts, Buford instructed his 2,700 men, fall back gradually and prevent the enemy from making a full-scale assault on the hills.

Then he sent messengers galloping to General John Reynolds, begging the Pennsylvanian to rush his First Corps to Gettysburg. Reynolds’ men the night of June 30th were encamped in northern Maryland, some eight or nine miles south of Buford’s position. If the Federals were to maintain control of the high ground, thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of reinforcements would be needed before noon; otherwise, the Rebels would gain a decided advantage.

Sure enough, Reynolds arrived early that morning, ultimately slamming his 12,000 men into the Rebel front. Within minutes, Reynolds was killed by a Confederate sniper.

Buford’s fallback strategy worked. For much of the first day, the Union forces were outnumbered and on the defensive, yet at sunset, they were still in charge of the high ground. It was Fredericksburg in reverse. Now, the other side would be forced to launch vertical attacks on entrenched positions.

*

In the aftermath of the war, various theories were put forth to explain how Strong Vincent and his brigade came to defend Little Round Top. Most scholars, however, have come to accept Oliver Willcox Norton’s version of events. Despite the chaos that engulfed them that evening, the Third Brigade’s orderly and bugler was never more than a few yards from Vincent’s side.

Professor Allen C. Guelzo, who once taught at Gettysburg College, writes in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion that Sykes was alerted in mid-afternoon that his corps would be needed to buttress Sickles’s position. An irascible Tammany Hall politician bereft of military training and instinct, Sickles had defied orders and moved his men off the high ground and down into the Peach Orchard at the base of the ridge and round tops. Thanks to Sickles’s gaffe, his corps was now vulnerable to assault from three directions. By late afternoon, Sickles was getting pummeled in and around the orchard by General Lafayette McLaw’s Division of General James Longstreet’s corps.

In one of the war’s most hotly debated moments, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee on the morning of July 2nd had ordered Longstreet to frontally assault the Union left flank. Longstreet protested, urging Lee to swing the entire Army of Northern Virginia to the right around the Union line, get between Meade and Washington, D.C., pick more favorable ground, and force the Federals to attack them. Lee refused, insisting that Longstreet try to dislodge the enemy from the hills and win the battle in front of them. Lee’s obstinance helped sound the Confederacy’s death knell.

It took the South Carolinian the bulk of Thursday to choose a location from which to launch his assault, a delay known – sardonically in Confederate lore – as “Longstreet’s Long March.” But when Longstreet finally did attack, it was with a vengeance. The Union high command’s nightmare scenario was unfolding: the Rebels were again poised to sweep the field with a bold maneuver, just as they’d done at Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville.

*

When word came from Meade’s staff that it was time for the Fifth Corps to join the fight, officers barked the commands – Fall In! . . . Attention! . . . Load! . . . Load at Will! – to their 11,000 men sprawled across Powers Hill. Still, it took the better part of an hour – beginning roughly at four o’clock, Guelzo estimates – before the Fifth Corps was fully mobilized. Sykes knew the situation was dire; he ordered his division closest to the fighting – the First – to move out as soon as possible.

Under the erratic leadership of General James Barnes, the division was at the corps’ point as it began marching toward Sickles’ position a little after quarter past four. Like Sickles, Barnes was another Union officer who had little business being entrusted with command. First Division officers, Vincent among them, knew that when a firefight was imminent, Barnes had a tendency to go hors de combat, often drinking himself into a stupor.

Barnes and his horse were apparently not at the head of the column as it moved toward the fighting, now just a few hundred yards in front of them and growing more cacophonous by the second. The First Division, with the Third Brigade in the lead, was approaching the action, scholars believe, from the north side of Little Round Top.

American military history is full of fortuitous moments, when the right officer happened to be in charge at the right moment. But none loom as large as the presence of bullheaded Strong Vincent and his intrepid Third Brigade at the tip of the Fifth Corps’ spear that late July afternoon. Like Myers and Guelzo, Edwin B. Coddington, author of The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command, embraced Norton’s account of the pivotal moments leading up to the defense of Little Round Top. Coddington, Guelzo, and Myers all say that Vincent spied a young courier racing on a horse, craning his neck as he rode, clearly looking for General Barnes – and not finding him.

Vincent spurred his horse forward and intercepted the messenger, insisting that he disclose the orders he was carrying. At first the junior officer balked, saying they were for Barnes’ eyes and ears only. But Vincent, knowing that Barnes was incapacitated, would have none of it.

“What are your orders?” Vincent demanded. “Give me your orders!”

The orders, the courier eventually spat out, were for Barnes to “send one of his brigades to occupy that hill yonder.” He then pointed to the smaller of the two round tops.

Vincent replied “Very well!” and vowed to hurry his 1,300 men to the top. He then instructed the courier to inform his superiors that he, Colonel Strong Vincent of General Barnes’ Third Brigade, would take responsibility for his action. Vincent was fully aware of the gravity of what he was doing. For a brigade commander to move his men in the heat of battle without explicit orders was a court-martial offense. But there was no time to observe chain-of-command protocol with McLaws’ men about to overwhelm Sickles’ position and run like banshees toward the round tops. Soon, McLaws’ division of Georgians and Alabamians was joined by Texans and Arkansians from General John Hood’s division.

The orders that Vincent intercepted, historians believe, had originated with General Gouverneur K. Warren, a topographical engineer by training and the Army of the Potomac’s chief engineer. Earlier that afternoon, Warren had been in a group of senior officers riding with General Meade to appraise the Union left side, which the high command had been worried about all day.

Warren suggested to Meade that to get a better view of the situation, the chief engineer, his field staff, and his signal corpsmen would ride to the summit of Little Round Top and report back. Once there, Warren was alarmed to discover that Sickles’ precipitous move had left the hill almost completely deserted. Warren recognized right away that the Federals were susceptible to an attack from the enemy right. Some Rebel troops – Guelzo described them as “a pack of ravenous wolves” – had already reached the jagged rock formation at the base of the round tops known as Devil’s Den. The situation was so bleak that Warren directed his signalmen to wave their big flags, hoping it might deceive the enemy into thinking the hill was still occupied.

Warren rode down into the valley, either found Sykes or sent a messenger to him – accounts vary – and urged the corps commander to dispatch a brigade of men onto Little Round Top before it was too late. With confusion rampant and precious minutes slipping by, scholars believe that it took multiple horsebound messengers bouncing among Meade, Warren, Sickles, and Sykes before word of the potential calamity finally reached the head of Sykes’ column – and then only because Vincent seized the initiative and flagged down the nervous courier.

The whole episode was pathetically constipated on the one hand and complete serendipity on the other. “The occupation of Little Round Top at the right time and right place by Vincent’s brigade was the result of a combination of circumstances and a stroke of rare good luck for which no one person in the Union high command could claim the credit,” wrote Coddington more than a century after the battle.

         *

Whether by luck or by pluck, Vincent never hesitated in asserting control. He immediately ordered bugler Norton to sound the alarm that the brigade was shifting its position to the left – and on the double-quick. Vincent then summoned his senior regimental commander, Colonel James Clay Rice of the 44th New York, and directed him to explain the urgency of the situation to the three other regimental commanders in the brigade – and to follow Vincent’s lead up the hill.

Vincent and Norton galloped to the base of Little Round Top, desperately searching for a trail. It took a few minutes, but they found an old logging path winding up the mound’s southern face near the swale with Big Round Top. The taller hill’s woods were so thick it made it almost impassable. But loggers had removed so many trees from Little Round Top over the years that a hellbent foe could assault it from its northern, western, and southern sides. Vincent hollered at his men to sprint to the summit as the equestrian whipped his horse up the trail.

When he and Norton got to the top, Vincent looked down on “a scene of pure disaster,” Guelzo writes. By then, hundreds of Longstreet’s men from both divisions were beginning to pick their way through the rocks at the bottom of the hill, Rebel-yelling every step. Many hundreds more were minutes away from joining them.

Norton was still dutifully displaying the brigade’s colors as musket shots started crashing into the rocks behind the pair.

“Down with that flag, Norton!” Vincent shouted, according to color bearer’s own account. “Damn it, go behind the rocks with it!”

Vincent handed the reins of his horse to his orderly. Then the colonel raced along the spur of the summit, trying to determine the best strategic positions for his men to defend. He hurriedly placed the 16th Michigan, the first unit to arrive, on the right flank facing almost due west; Rice and the 44th New York he put in the right-center, also looking west; the 83rd Pennsylvania he put in the left-center, facing southwest; and the 20th Maine he placed on the extreme left, also facing southwest, with one company looking almost due south across to Big Round Top. Vincent reminded Rice that the Butterfield Twins, the 44th New York and the 83rd Pennsylvania, had fought side-by-side many times; the brigade commander wanted them to do so again.  

As Vincent situated the 20th Maine, regimental commander Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, before the war a professor of philosophy and rhetoric at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, and after it, a public servant and orator nonpareil, thought the Pennsylvanian addressed him “with a voice of awe.”

“I place you here,” Vincent thundered at Chamberlain. “This is the left of the Union line. You understand?”

Then the great-grandson of two Revolutionary War stalwarts delivered what is arguably the most consequential military order in the Republic’s history: “You are to hold this ground at all costs!”

Any retreat at all, both officers understood, could brook disaster for the Army of the Potomac, eroding its entire defensive posture, and throwing the outcome of the battle into doubt.

Vincent then ran back to the middle of the line, hollering at a staff officer to climb a bluff and keep him apprised of the enemy advance. He then turned to the 83rd’s adjutant, Lieutenant John M. Clark, and ordered him to return to the valley, find someone in command, and have him send reinforcements at once. Shouting into the ear of the Allegheny College alumnus who’d served at his side for two years, Vincent told him to deliver this message: “The enemy are coming against us with overwhelming force!”

Vincent instructed a third aide to procure more ammunition from Fifth Corps munitions officers down below. The Rebels were now getting so close that Norton put down his bugle, grabbed a musket, and jumped into the left-center of the line with his mates from the 83rd.

Things were so muddled that General Warren at this point apparently did not know that Vincent’s brigade had filled the void on Little Round Top. On his horse at the bottom of the hill, Warren spotted his old outfit, the 140th New York Infantry, commanded by Colonel Patrick O’Rorke, an immigrant from County Cavan in the North of Ireland. Warren ordered Paddy and his men to get to the top post-haste. When O’Rorke protested that his superiors expected him to follow the rest of the corps into the valley, Guelzo has Warren replying: “Never mind that, Paddy. Bring your regiment up [to the top] and I will take the responsibility.”

Warren also urged O’Rorke not to bother dressing his unit’s line once he got to the summit – there’d be no time for it.

The chief engineer was proven prescient. By the time O’Rorke and his men reached the peak, the Texans and Arkansians attacking the 16th Michigan on the right flank of Vincent’s line had begun breaking through.

“Here they are men! Commence firing!” O’Rorke shouted. A moment later, Paddy was shot through the neck, killed instantly.

The 526 men in O’Rorke’s unit had arrived in the nick of time. Together with the 44th New York and the remnants of the 16th Michigan, they succeeded in damming the Rebel surge. Soon they were buoyed by the 91st and 115th Pennsylvania and the 146th New York, whose clutch presence most likely can be attributed to Lieutenant Clark’s plea for reinforcements with the Fifth Corps’ brass.

Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, furious and bloody. In his The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby Foote writes that no fewer than five charges and counter-charges were mounted that evening on Little Round Top; each time the Rebels gained a toehold, they were shoved back. Vincent’s hastily-constructed line buckled but never broke.

The biggest threat came on the Federal right. In the middle of the maelstrom, Norton, Judson, and others remember Vincent running to his right to rally the Michiganders, shouting at them to get back into line. Waving Lizzie’s riding crop, he jumped onto a boulder, making himself, Nevins and Styple write, “an ideal target for hundreds of Confederate muskets.”

Moments after yelling, “Don’t yield an inch, boys, don’t yield an inch!”  Vincent was shot through the left groin. The Minié ball ended up lodged in his right thigh, shattering his pelvis and damaging other bones. He most likely collapsed on the boulder’s surface, perhaps languishing for some time before help arrived.

Amos Judson’s history of the 83rd has Vincent saying through gritted teeth, “This is the fourth or fifth time they have shot at me, and they have hit me at last.” He was carried to safety behind the 83rd’s position, which held steady throughout the carnage.

Colonel Rice of the 44th New York assumed command after Vincent was wounded. The Rebel attacks against the Federal middle and right began to wane toward sunset. But the Georgians and Alabamians on the southern side of Little Round Top kept heaving up the hill against Chamberlain and the 20th Maine. At twilight, virtually out of ammunition, Chamberlain famously ordered his remaining men to fix bayonets and countercharge down the hill.

The gambit worked, aided by the company of men close to Big Round Top. At a pivotal moment, they suddenly turned and fired into the exhausted Rebels, then joined Chamberlain’s pursuit down the slope. Before they spread themselves too thin in the darkness, Rice reeled back in the 20th Maine. Like the rest of the men in blue that night, they had more than done their job.

*

It had been complete mayhem, but somehow the four regiments of the Third Brigade and the four other Fifth Corps regiments that stormed to the top of the hill kept the Rebels from gaining control of Little Round Top. The human cost was ghastly: of the roughly 1,300 men in the Third Brigade, more than 530 of them had been killed or wounded.

As darkness settled that evening, Generals Meade, Butterfield, Sykes, Warren, et al., weren’t sure how, but they knew that Vincent had saved the day. Without Strong’s initiative, the left flank of the of the army may well have crumbled. If they had gotten clear of Little Round Top, the Army of Northern Virginia might have swung to its left and crushed the Union center in a maneuver painfully reminiscent of past fiascos.

Vincent stopped that scenario from happening – an exemplary bit of valor not lost on the high command. When Union generals made gaffes in previous battles, there was no one there to pick them up. Without the Third Brigade’s leader, Sickles might well be viewed in American history in the same ignominious light as Benedict Arnold.

*

It was pitch dark when Vincent was transported to the gruesome field hospital inside Jacob Weikert’s farmhouse on the northeastern slope of Little Round Top. Colonel Rice, Vincent’s successor, dispatched Oliver Norton to find more horse-drawn ambulances and – if the bugler could – the wounded Colonel Vincent. Groping in the darkness, Norton was not able to redirect more ambulances to Little Round Top. But he encountered injured soldiers from the 16th Michigan who said Vincent had been taken to the Weikert house.

The home was something out of Dante’s Inferno. Norton walked past dozens of men in screaming in anguish before he found Vincent. His boss had lost a lot of blood. Vincent was barely able to speak but recognized Norton and held out his hand. Norton grasped it, saying, “The boys are still there, Colonel.”

Vincent smiled and squeezed his hand, Norton wrote in The Attack and Defense of Little Round Top, his book that commemorated Gettysburg’s 50th anniversary. Norton tried to tell Vincent how much he meant to the men of the Third Brigade but was overcome with emotion and had to take his leave.

“That was my last sight of one of the most gallant heroes of the war,” Norton remembered in 1913, seven years before he died.

The Weikert home apparently proved too susceptible to stray shelling. Cannon fire the next day forced the medical staff to transport Vincent and many others to the Louis Bushman farm a mile removed from the action. By then, it was clear to the doctors that Vincent would not survive. Vincent asked to be taken to Erie to be with his wife and family but the physicians refused. He was in no condition to travel.

 “I presume I have done my last fighting,” Vincent supposedly said when told the assessment. He must have known his prognosis was bleak.

On July 4th, America’s 87th birthday, Adjutant Clark was told to find a functioning telegraph station and wire the sad news to Vincent’s family back home. He rode to Westminster, Maryland, twenty miles southeast.

The telegram reached the Vincent household late on July 5th or early the next morning. Lizzie, seven months pregnant, couldn’t possibly make the trip to Gettysburg, despite her husband’s wishes. B.B., her-father-in-law, immediately boarded a train; once there, he made arrangements to be taken to the battlefield.

When B.B. finally got to Gettysburg on July 8th or 9th, it was next to impossible to get straight information about his son’s status or pinpoint where he had been hospitalized.

By then, of course, it was too late. In his book, Judson noted that Vincent began “gradually sinking away” on July 5th, slipping in and out of consciousness. Judson wrote that Vincent believed it was “unworthy” for a soldier to display “outward manifestation of suffering.” So, Vincent kept his lips pursed through the agony.

Word that Vincent was at death’s door reached the Union high command as Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia slipped across the Potomac on their trek back to their Virginia sanctuary. Generals Meade and Butterfield petitioned President Lincoln’s War Department to give Vincent a battlefield promotion. The request was granted overnight.

Sykes, Barnes, and other senior officers came by the Bushman farm to pay their respects. It’s doubtful that Vincent was coherent enough to appreciate his elevation to brigadier general or discuss how he’d ended up at the summit of Little Round Top. By the morning of July 7th, four-and-a-half days after Vincent was wounded, it was clear that the end was imminent.

Judson described a scene in which Vincent was struggling to recite the Lord’s Prayer “when the soul of this young hero passed away to another world.” Vincent was embalmed that day so his body could be transported for burial.

Crawford Countian Clark, who’d been with Vincent since Erie Regiment days in the spring of ’61, was assigned to accompany Vincent’s corpse to Erie and help arrange the brigadier general’s memorial service. Clark headed out on Wednesday, July 8th, apparently unaware that Vincent’s father was then looking for his son around the battlefield. Strong’s body was already aboard a train when B.B. learned the awful news. Despite his grief, B.B. helped get the body of another 83rd Regiment martyr, Captain John Sell, embalmed, coffined, and sent home to Erie.

Then B.B. himself departed for home. His son’s funeral services would take place on Monday, July 13th, at the Vincent house in Erie and at St. Paul’s Episcopal.

Mourners filing through the Vincents’ parlor that day saw a coffin draped in black crepe with an American flag entwined around it. Wreaths of flowers and evergreens adorned the casket.

A detachment of U.S. Regulars from Waterford, the Vincents’ ancestral home, were pressed into duty as an honor guard. The Regulars led a lengthy procession to St. Paul’s that featured rolling cannons, members of the Erie County legal profession, foundrymen from Vincent, Himrod & Co., and a panoply of horse-drawn carriages.

The Erie Weekly Gazette reported that those who heard the “melancholy and imposing obsequies” at the service would not soon forget them. Once Reverend J.F. Spaulding concluded his funeral rites at Erie Cemetery, the honor guard fired a volley over Vincent’s grave.

“While we lament his death, and condole with his bereaved and stricken wife, father, mother, brothers, and sister, we yet point to his example as worthy of imitation by all ‘the truly noble’ and patriotic,” the reverend’s homily ended.

Colonel Rice, now the Third Brigade’s commanding officer, that week issued an announcement to his troops about Vincent’s demise. “A soldier, a scholar, a friend has fallen. For his country, struggling for its life, he willingly gave his own,” Rice wrote.

Less than a year later, Rice himself would die on another abhorrent killing field, the Wilderness battlefield in Virginia.

A friend of Lizzie’s described her as so distraught in the days after Strong’s funeral that she did not want to sleep for fear that she’d have more nightmares. Two months after her father’s death, Blanche Strong Vincent came into this world. The baby was sickly at birth and never gained full health. Blanche would not live to see her first birthday, an occurrence that was far too common in the 19th century.

Now grieving twice over, Lizzie chose to stay a member of the Vincent household. She never remarried and moved with Boyd Vincent’s family when the Episcopal priest was transferred, first to a church in Pittsburgh, then to another parish in Cincinnati. Lizzie was active in church and community work, conducting art classes for women and authoring two books: Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and Madonna in Legend and Art. She remained fluent enough in German, French, and Italian to provide translation services and collected a library full of books on art and literature. Lizzie also devoted much of her life to caring for her mentally impaired brother-in-law, Ward Vincent.

She lived for five full decades after her husband’s death, passing away at age 76 in 1914. The equestrienne was buried next to Strong and Blanche in Erie Cemetery. At the center of the family plot is a “Vincent” granite memorial with a large Maltese Cross – the Fifth Corps talisman that Oliver Willcox Norton, Strong Vincent’s flag bearer, carried to the summit of Little Round Top – engraved beneath the name.

Lizzie knew how much Norton had meant to her husband and was grateful to the bugler for keeping Strong’s legacy alive. In her will, she left him two hundred dollars to buy the best cigars he could find. Norton gently refused the money, donating it instead to a church charity.

In 1889, a quarter-century after the battle, a monument to the 83rd Pennsylvania was erected on Little Round Top. Back then, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s rules governing Civil War statues forbade memorials that honored individual soldiers. Although it’s clear that the bronze likeness atop the monument was inspired by Vincent, there’s no plaque that explicitly identifies him.

The monument shows the 83rd officer drawing a sword out of a scabbard affixed to his waist, which is not an accurate depiction of Strong Vincent’s actions on the evening of July 2, 1863. In his memoirs, Norton wrote that Vincent was so rushed when he dismounted at the top of the hill that he forgot to grab the scabbard from his saddle. The only “weapon” Vincent was carrying in those fateful minutes was his wife’s riding crop.

The statue of Vincent at Erie’s Blasco Memorial Library, unveiled in 1997, got his heroic stance correct. Not only is he seen waving the riding crop in a menacing way, but he’s depicted looking down – which given the proximity of the enemy when he jumped onto that boulder, was surely the direction he was staring when struck by the fatal bullet.

*

The men that Vincent trained and with whom he fought side-by-side had plenty of war left. After Gettysburg, the Third Brigade and its 83rd Regiment fought in a dozen skirmishes and in such major battles as Spotsylvania, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and in April of 1865, the final throes of the conflagration at Appomattox Court House. No brigade in the Union Army fought with greater tenacity, perseverance, or élan.

One of those fighters, John M. Clark, returned home to Meadville, started McCauley & Clark, a wholesale dealership in fine wines, liquors, ales, and cigars. He also ended up the proprietor of two different hotels and, for eight years, served as chief of Meadville’s fire department.

Clark married a local lass named Bessie Banyard in 1862. They had three children and eventually relocated to Snyder in the Oklahoma Territory, where Clark died in 1905, two years before Oklahoma became a state.

The hill that Clark, Oliver Willcox Norton, and Strong Vincent climbed under duress on the evening of July 2, 1863 was a far cry from the arid West. It looked over jagged rocks, some small creeks, a batch of fertile farmland, and off to the north, a charming village with a seminary and a college. It’s not known if Elizabeth Carter Vincent left a remembrance for Clark’s heirs; surely, though, she had a special place in her heart for the Crawford Countian who comforted her while her husband’s body was being laid to rest.

In the months after Gettysburg, Norton enrolled in a special officers training class and become a lieutenant with the Eighth Colored Regiment. In February 1864, he helped lead the Black unit at the Battle of Olustee near Jacksonville, Florida. Olustee did not go well for the Union side. Norton was fortunate that he wasn’t captured, since the Rebels had vowed to execute any White officer caught commanding Black troops.

It took three decades, but Norton finally accepted credit for composing “Taps” in 1862 with General Dan Butterfield, then a Fifth Corps brigade commander. The two worked together in taking an old French marching tune and reshaping it as a 24-note homage to the end of a soldier’s day. After more than a century and a half, the Norton-Butterfield collaboration remains a staple of solemn military occasions, a melancholy tribute to the sacrifice of American soldiers that never fails to move its listeners.

It’s not known if Norton played “Taps” on the evening of July 1, 1863, as the Third Brigade troops pitched their tents outside Hanover, but for posterity’s sake, let’s hope that he did. Soon enough that night, Vincent ordered him to blare “Assembly!”, which eventually sent scores of his mates to their deaths.

Norton became a successful Gilded Age entrepreneur. He and his brother devised a cost-effective method of manufacturing metal cans. At the turn of the 20th century, their company was acquired by the American Can Company, a spinoff from Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel.  

In 1889, the onetime schoolteacher was among the speakers as the 83rd’s monument was being unveiled at Gettysburg. “Throwing himself into the breach, [Vincent] rallied his men, but gave up his own life,” Norton said that day. “In the very flower of his young manhood, full of the highest promise, with the love of a young wife filling his thoughts of the future with the fairest visions, proud, gentle, tender, true, he laid his gift at his country’s altar. It was done nobly, gladly.”

General Dan Butterfield, Norton’s “Taps” collaborator, wrote after the war that, “No man who lived and fought in the Battle of Gettysburg did more for his country than Vincent. He was a magnificent soldier, a gentleman of high education and great ability.”

That gentleman of high education was honored by Erie in 1930 when Strong Vincent High School opened. To this day, the school takes up a full city block. Its grand sweep and classic columns are meant to inspire the ideals that Butterfield saw in Vincent: discipline and high moral character. Inspirational quotes are inscribed on the school’s facade, along with the Vincent family coat of arms, an azure shield with a silver and white half-ram above this motto: Vincenti dabitur laurea, “The laurel will be given to the victor.”

After 87 years – Abraham Lincoln’s revered four score and seven – it closed as a high school, having been consolidated with two other city schools. It was converted into a junior high and is still going – as it should – strong.

“Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great jurist and brevet colonel with the 20th Massachusetts Regiment, wrote of the Civil War generation. “It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” 

Norton and Clark lived long enough to see the Great War, World War I, decimate a different continent. The pair had fought not only in a great war, but in a Great Cause War.

In the decades following the war, Medal of Honor recipient Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain became something of a beau idéal for the celebration of that cause. Chamberlain delivered scores of speeches all over the country – North and South – saluting the Third Brigade’s heroics. But his most memorable remarks, like Norton’s, came a quarter-century after the battle at the dedication of the 20th Maine’s memorial at Gettysburg.

“The lesson impressed on me as I stand here and my heart and mind traverse your faces, and the years that are gone, is that in a great, momentous struggle like this commemorated here, it is character that tells,” the teacher of rhetoric said that day.

“What I mean by character is a firm and seasoned substance of soul. I mean such qualities or acquirements as intelligence, thoughtfulness, conscientiousness, right-mindedness, patience, fortitude, long-suffering and unconquerable resolve.”

Vincent exhibited all of those qualities, Chamberlain said, when with “earnest and prophetic eyes,” he issued his seminal order not to retreat, no matter the circumstance.

Chamberlain reminded his listeners that Vincent had bellowed into his ear “You understand?”, as Rebel Minié balls tore into the trees around them.

“I did understand with a heavy weight on my mind and spirit,” Chamberlain shared with his mates. “You understood – and it was done. Held – and at what cost?!”

The cost, of course, was grievous – but in the end, utterly worth it. Surely, Strong Vincent sensed what would happen when he leapt onto that boulder. He was our Republic’s Horatius at the most epochal gate in American history.

Now read more on the Battle of Gettysburg here.

Timothy M. Gay is a Pulitzer-nominated author of five books and dozens of articles about history and culture. His most recent book is RORY LAND, which looks at the life of golf superstar Rory McIlroy through the prism of Ireland’s troubled past. A graduate of Georgetown University, Gay grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, the proud home of a host of Little Round Top heroes in the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment.

Colonel Strong Vincent and the Epic Struggle for Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg: Part I - The Soil of Old Pennsylvania

A 26-year-old Union brigade commander risked being court-martialed when, without orders, he rushed his four regiments to the summit of an undefended hill at a crucial moment during the Battle of Gettysburg. The Harvard graduate’s valor may have saved the Army of the Potomac – but it cost him his life. Timothy M. Gay explains – in part 1 of 2.

Colonel Strong Vincent. Source: Public domain, Library of Congress, available here.

The bugle blare ordering the men to break camp that steamy Wednesday evening could not have come at a worse moment. Having not eaten a restful meal in days, the 1,300 soldiers of the Third Brigade, First Division, Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac had just settled down to supper when the dreaded “Assembly!” call came screeching through their campground.  

Now the infantrymen weren’t just ravenous, they were spitting mad. No doubt muttering curses while gulping a last bite of salted beef, they doused their fires, struck their tents, grabbed their equipment, and scrambled into formation. A dozen miles off, they could hear sporadic cannon fire. At first the noise was muffled, like distant thunderclaps from the summer storms that stalked them on their grueling trek north from Virginia. But as the Fifth Corps’ ten brigades – nine infantry, one artillery – hustled west, kicking up clouds of dust in what was already searing heat, the sounds grew sharper and more ominous.

General George Sykes, who had taken command of the corps just days before when President Lincoln elevated Major General George Meade to overall head of the Army of the Potomac, pushed his men past the brink of exhaustion. By the middle of the night, one Fifth Corps soldier recalled, “all human endurance was on the verge of utter collapse.”

Private Oliver Willcox Norton, a former northwestern Pennsylvania schoolteacher, was lucky. As a bugler, color bearer, and orderly, Norton was given a horse to keep abreast of the Third Brigade’s commanding officer. But almost every other enlisted man in the corps that night was struggling to stay upright, dragging one foot in front of the other.

Squinting their eyes in the purplish predawn, the men could make out a pair of hills to their left, a slight ridge dead ahead, and a mound to their right. They knew that beyond that high ground, a fierce battle was raging outside a crossroads called Gettysburg. It was now Thursday, July 2, 1863.

Third Brigade veterans had no illusions about the cataclysm that awaited them. At Gaines’ Mill in June of 1862, mired in the swamplands of Virginia’s Chickahominy River, they were caught in an ambush, losing close to half their men. Eight weeks later at Second Bull Run, many of them were forced to make a reckless charge into Confederate General Stonewall Jackson’s entrenched line; again, they suffered horrific losses. Four months removed from the Manassas debacle, under withering fire at Fredericksburg, elements of the Third crept as far up Marey’s Heights as any Federal unit. In frigid weather, they spent the better part of two days hunkered down within a stone’s throw of the Rebel front, trying to drown out the cries of wounded comrades. When their mates expired, as Michael Shaara described in The Killer Angels, they used the dead bodies as macabre shields against enemy fire.

Halfway through another year, their new brigade leader was predicting that a decisive clash was on the horizon. “We move tomorrow for the Pennsylvania border,” he had written two days earlier to his 25-year-old bride. Seven months pregnant with their first and only child, Elizabeth Carter Vincent was at their home some 330 miles northwest in Erie, Pennsylvania. Like her husband, “Lizzie” was a graceful equestrian. Acquaintances marveled at what a handsome couple they made while riding in tandem. Lizzie was also an accomplished scholar in an age when few women received formal educations; she was fluent in four languages and a devotee of religious art.

“A general battle must ensue soon,” the colonel penned in what proved to be his final letter to his wife. “[The enemy’s] fate is sealed.”

Lizzie’s husband did not suffer fools gladly. He knew his stern visage and burly frame were intimidating – and learned to use them to full effect. Thick-necked and barrel-chested, he had powerful arms, deep-set eyes, and a pair of bristly side whiskers that matched a flinty temper. As a youngster, he had won more than his share of fistfights and wrestling bouts.

It wasn’t just the Army of Northern Virginia whose fate was sealed in the early summer of 1863. At noontime on July 1stas the brigade crossed into his native commonwealth, the colonel ordered that the tattered colors of the Pennsylvania regiment under his aegis – the 83rd Infantry, the outfit that two years earlier he had helped organize – be unfurled, including a banner with its designated corps insignia, a crimson Maltese Cross. The cross symbolized the Fifth Corps’ devotion to God in eradicating evil; in the Union Army’s troop identification system, the color red meant it belonged to the corps’ First Division.

With the 83rd’s flags fluttering, the colonel rode through the brigade, directing his men to give three cheers for the Keystone State. “Hip, hip, hooray, Pennsylvania!” they hollered three times, happy to be north of the Mason-Dixon Line for the first time in more than a year. As dusk descended and the brigade neared its campsite outside Hanover, the colonel again ordered that the 83rd’s colors be uncased, but this time with a drum corps providing ceremonial pomp.

Once the sun disappeared that evening, Private Norton in all likelihood serenaded the men with “Taps,” the mournful end-of-day bugle call he had cowritten a year earlier with General Dan Butterfield. Butterfield, a veteran Fifth Corps officer, was now serving as General Meade’s chief of staff.

Norton and his old cohorts in the 83rd Pennsylvania were an eclectic mix. They hailed from different parts of the commonwealth, but mainly from Erie and its neighboring counties: Warren, Crawford, Venango, and Mercer. Before the war, Norton had taught school in Girard, a farm village southwest of Erie. Besides teachers and farmers, the 83rdincluded boatsmen, blacksmiths, bricklayers, barmen, carpenters, wagon drivers, railroaders, store clerks, shop owners, a few foundry workers, and a smattering of immigrants from Ireland and Germany – plus one notable second-generation Scottish-American. They fought with such ferocity in so many battles that at war’s end it was determined that only one regiment in the entire Union Army – the Fifth New Hampshire – had suffered a higher casualty rate.

They were proud to be called “Mud Turtles,” after an episode early in the war when one of its charges stuck a small Confederate flag onto a turtle's flipper and let it waddle around in the muck, to the cackling amusement of men from other units.

But none of the Mud Turtles were cackling as their colors were being presented at sunset on the outskirts of Hanover. To the martial thump of drums, Colonel Strong Vincent, the Third Brigade’s brand-new commander and the former head of the 83rd, removed his hat, bowed his head, turned to his adjutant, a lieutenant of Scottish descent from Meadville in Crawford County named John M. Clark, and uttered: “What death more glorious can any man desire than to die on the soil of old Pennsylvania fighting for that flag?”

 *

“What death more glorious?” It’s such a poignant phrase that authors James H. Nevins and William B. Styple used it as the title of their 1997 book about the unflinching young man who sacrificed his life for something beautiful and profound: the preservation of the American Republic.

Did the 26-year-old Strong Vincent, a Harvard graduate and scion of one of Erie’s most prominent families, truly wax thatpoetic the evening before being mortally wounded? Well, none of us were there, so it’s impossible to know.

We know this much, however: amid all its bloody fratricide, the mid-19th century was an intensely romantic age. As filmmaker Ken Burns lovingly captured in his series The Civil War, combatants and non-combatants alike – from Abraham Lincoln to the spouse of the lowliest private – tended to emote in lyrical terms, often citing biblical passages and classic verse.

Indeed, a National Park Service essay on the Battle of Gettysburg suggests that Vincent’s “glorious death” prophesy may have been inspired by poet Thomas Babington Macaulay. The Englishman’s epic 1842 work, known informally as Horatius at the Gate, saluted the Roman martyr’s courage in defeating the invading Etruscans in 509 BC. During Vincent’s schoolboy days at the private Erie Academy, Horatius was surely assigned as must-memorize literature:

Then out spake brave Horatius,

The Captain of the Gate:

“To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his gods.”

Still, the enlisted man who ascribed the death musing to Vincent – his orderly Norton who, a half-century later, wrote a pair of memoirs that had a lasting effect on Civil War scholarship – was doubtless eager to trumpet his dead boss’s heroics. The “Taps” cocomposer may have exercised some literary license. Perhaps Vincent’s actual words that evening were a bit more prosaic.

But there was nothing prosaic about Vincent’s gallantry the next night astride Little Round Top. Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment – heralded by Shaara, Burns, a host of other chroniclers, and not incidentally, the publicity-and-legacy-seeking future governor, Chamberlain himself – are justly revered for their twilight stand on Little Round Top’s southwestern slope. Too often overlooked, however, is the brigade commander who, with Minié and cannon balls shrieking through the air and thousands of wild-eyed enemy infantrymen clambering up the hill, brilliantly positioned the 20th Maine, the 83rd Pennsylvania, and his two other regiments, the 44th New York and the 16th Michigan. Despite his Horatius-like role in repelling the attackers, Vincent got nary a mention in Professor James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, the much-admired book that cracked the bestseller lists.

Amid the pandemonium that night, Vincent had the presence of mind to tell Chamberlain that his 360 Mainers now represented the extreme left flank of the Army of the Potomac. Any retreat whatsoever, Vincent admonished, could spell catastrophe.

“You understand?! You are to hold this ground at all costs!” Vincent yelled into Chamberlain’s ear as the bedlam below grew louder. Then the Pennsylvanian raced off to rally the rest of his troops.

Within minutes, the Rebels were threatening to swamp the right side of the Third Brigade’s line; they were as close to Vincent’s position as he had gotten to theirs at Fredericksburg. He leapt atop a boulder, brandishing the riding crop that Lizzie had given him as a keepsake, bleating, “Don’t yield an inch, men! Don’t yield an inch!”

Seconds later, he keeled over, shot through the hip and groin.

*

It would have come as no surprise to Thomas Babington Macaulay that the ashes of Strong Vincent’s forebears burned deep. Ancestors on both sides of his family fought in the American Revolution. His paternal great-grandfather, Cornelius Vincent, along with two of his sons, Strong’s great-great uncles, were captured in 1779 by British infantry at the Battle of Fort Freeland in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania; all three were exiled to a prison camp in Quebec, where they spent the next three years in captivity. His maternal great-grandfather, Timothy Strong, enlisted in a Litchfield County, Connecticut, volunteer outfit at age 55 and helped underwrite the Patriot cause.  

Strong Vincent was born in Waterford, a picturesque village a dozen miles south of Erie, in the spring of 1837, the first-born child of Bethuel Boyd (B.B.) Vincent and his wife, Sarah Strong Vincent. Seven siblings were to follow, but only four survived their childhoods. Waterford is most noted for being the home of Fort LeBoeuf, the frontier outpost where a cheeky 21-year-old Virginian named George Washington delivered Great Britain’s ultimatum to the French in 1753, helping to trigger the French and Indian War.

The Erie County of Strong Vincent’s boyhood was a hotbed of abolitionism and a haven for escaping slaves. Runaways were hidden in “safe homes” in Waterford, Erie, and other places, fed hot meals, then concealed in horse-drawn wagons or spirited through the woods, eventually being smuggled onto Lake Erie ships bound for Canada and freedom

The Vincents, originally “Van Sants” as Strong Vincent biographer Hans G. Myers has documented, were prosperous Huguenots who fled religious persecution in France, arriving in the New World in 1687. His mother’s clan, the Strongs, had been in the colonies even longer: they were direct descendants of the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay. Strong Vincent’s great-great-great grandfather, the felicitously named “Elder John” Strong, was born in Somerset, England, around 1605. He emigrated to Massachusetts in the 1630s and lived another seven decades, purportedly fathering 18 children with two wives!

Strong Vincent’s paternal grandfather, Judge John Vincent, made a fortune by establishing mercantile and freight routes through the wilderness between Waterford and Erie and later along the lake between Erie and Cleveland, exacting fees for the use of his roads, wagons, and vessels.

 His maternal grandfather, Captain Martin Strong, grew up on the family farm in Connecticut before moving to New York State’s Genessee Valley, where he mastered the science of land surveying. In 1795, after surviving a harrowing trip on horseback, he moved to Presque Isle, a peninsula jutting into Lake Erie. For much of his journey, he had to look out for highwaymen and rogue Iroquois warriors.

Martin Strong soon became northwestern Pennsylvania’s leading territorial surveyor, eventually acquiring huge tracts of land, becoming a Waterford/Erie power broker and an intimate of John Vincent. When John Vincent routed his Waterford Turnpike around Martin Strong’s property, Martin – no fool, he – cashed in by establishing a nearby tavern and tollgate. Martin Strong was also a leader in the local unit of the Pennsylvania state militia, which earned him the title of “Captain.”

John Vincent, meanwhile, despite his lack of formal education, was appointed a magistrate, obtaining the “Judge” honorific. When the Judge’s son married the Captain’s daughter in 1834, it was a major event in Erie County social and business circles.

That son, B.B., became an industrial entrepreneur in Waterford and Erie. By 1840, B.B. co-owned Vincent, Himrod & Co., a Mill Creek iron foundry that produced stove plates, scale weights, railroad spikes, and other necessities that fueled the 19th century economy. The acquisitive B.B. also founded a bank and served as a manager of the Erie Canal Company, the commercial enterprise behind the 360-mile-long New York State waterway, completed in 1825, that transformed the northern half of the young Republic by linking the eastern seaboard to the Great Lakes. 

Both families were devoutly Christian. The Vincents were pillars of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Waterford, where young Strong was baptized, and later of St. Paul’s Episcopal in Erie after B.B. moved the family to the fledgling city of some 45,000 souls in 1843. The Strongs, for their part, built an ecumenical place of worship on their Erie County farm that they christened “Union Church”; the family encouraged its use by all Christian denominations.

Boyd Vincent, Strong’s younger brother who became an Episcopal minister, recalled decades later what it was like growing up in a rigorously Christian household. “Bible reading, family prayer, study of Sunday-school lessons, strict Sunday observance, carefully regulated amusements,” Boyd shared in a reminisce unearthed by Nevins and Styple.

Close to six feet tall and weighing 225 pounds, B.B. Vincent was not to be messed with. “When [Father] said ‘Come’ we came, and when he said ‘Go’ we went,” Boyd wrote.

The Vincents and the Strongs were surrounded by – and in some capacity, almost assuredly part of – a secret network devoted to ending the scourge of slavery. Erie County historical societies and Myers, author of the 2022 book The Lion of Round Top, have chronicled that B.B. Vincent’s business partner, William Himrod, was for decades one of northwestern Pennsylvania’s leading abolitionists and a key “conductor” along the Underground Railroad that snuck escaped slaves into Canada.

Erie was the terminus, scholars say, for several branches of the Underground Railroad that tapped old Seneca and Delaware Indian trails. The Senecas’ ancient Brokenstraw Path, for example, went through Sugar Grove near the New York State line in Warren County before meandering around Corry, Union City, and Waterford in Erie County.

Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves from the 1830s through the 1850s gained their freedom via Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York State Native American trails like the Brokenstraw. Sugar Grove became such a wellspring of abolitionism that the great Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, spoke at an anti-slavery convention there in 1854.

Did the young Strong Vincent witness escaped slaves being hurried from one home to the next or rushed onto boats anchored along Lake Erie? Almost certainly. Were the Vincent homes in Waterford and Erie used as safe houses? We can’t know for sure, but given the family’s religious convictions and personal and political connections, it’s a distinct possibility.

Moreover, young Vincent would have heard the Underground Railroad discussed at length at family and church gatherings, especially after slave catchers and federal marshals, emboldened by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a serious federal crime to harbor or aid escaped slaves, began harassing activists like his father’s close friend and business partner.

*

Photography was still in its relative infancy when war broke out in 1861. Picture-making was so primitive that it’s hard to distinguish one Civil War portrait from the next. Whether Reb or Yank, they’re eerily similar: the soldier stuck a hand in his uniform pocket, or inside open coat buttons, and struck a menacing pose – body erect, eyes narrow, mouth unsmiling.

The evolving insignias and epaulets affixed to Vincent’s uniform in one portrait shot after another reflect his promotions through the ranks, from second lieutenant all the way up to colonel in just over two years. There’s no photograph of Vincent as a brigadier general, since he was given that final honor as he lay dying in a Gettysburg farmhouse that, like scores of other dwellings in and around that benighted village, had been turned into an emergency hospital.

His friends recalled that Vincent took great pride in his muttonchop side whiskers; they were so thick and luxurious that they almost met under his chin. At least when having his portrait taken, Vincent kept his lower jaw and upper lip cleanly shaven.

Since a host of eyewitnesses – superiors, subordinates, even enemies – attested to Vincent’s courage, not just at Gettysburg but in earlier encounters, it’s easy more than a century and a half later to consider his Revolutionary War lineage, study the forbidding aura captured in photographs, and perceive greatness.

“There’s no doubt about it,” we tell ourselves. “This young man was destined to lead soldiers in battle.”

But was he?

*

In truth, there was little in Vincent’s boyhood to suggest future battlefield genius. As a youngster at Erie Academy, he was an indifferent student. To teach his 14-year-old son a lesson, his father let Strong leave school to work in the family foundry. After toiling for a few weeks around a red-hot furnace, Strong and B.B. decided the young man’s talents would be better suited to the foundry’s counting room. At a tender age, he began overseeing much of the factory’s labor force, report Nevins and Styple.

Within a couple of years, the Vincents realized that the youngster needed a stronger technical education to help grow the family business. At age 17, he entered the Scientific School at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, then run by his family’s lodestar, the Episcopal Church.

His academic records at Trinity have not survived, but his time in Hartford had its share of controversy. As a sophomore, Vincent began courting Lizzie, Miss Elizabeth Carter, a teacher at Miss Porter’s finishing school in Farmington that – scandalously for that era – taught its female students actual academic subjects, not just social niceties. On one of Vincent’s visits, a security guard at the school apparently said something disparaging about his lady friend – or at least Vincent interpreted the remark as such. It violated Vincent’s code of chivalry, which back in the 19th century was grounds for fisticuffs – and often much worse. Vincent proceeded to pummel the man, which got him into Dutch with Trinity’s Episcopal leadership.

Vincent either was expelled or decided to leave Trinity of his own volition – it’s unclear. Either way, he ended up transferring to Harvard. But instead of entering the Massachusetts school as a junior, he chose – or more likely, Harvard chose for him – to begin his career in Cambridge as a sophomore, essentially “repeating” a grade.

“In light of the event that precipitated his departure from Trinity, it is not known how Vincent managed his way into Harvard,” Nevins and Styple observed, before drolly adding: “Of course, it is possible that his father’s wealth may have made his Harvard welcome more cordial.”

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding his admission, Vincent made his mark at Harvard. Contemporaries remember him as a popular figure around campus, a young man whose commanding baritone could be heard from one end of Harvard Yard to the other.

“He looked many years older than he really was, and in every respect his mind corresponded to his body,” a classmate recalled. “One would have said, on hearing him converse, that he was twenty-five years old.”

But old habits die hard. He was still a middling student, although his grades improved as graduation neared. His final rank in the class of ’59 was squarely in the center – 46th out of 92 students. Vincent’s files also reveal that he was regularly reprimanded for skipping prayer sessions and for indulging his tobacco habit on the grounds.

He continued to court Lizzie through his Cambridge years. The couple became engaged at some point in 1860, after he returned to Erie to study law under the tutelage of William S. Lane, one of the area’s most successful attorneys.

B.B. Vincent, as historian Myers has revealed, served as a delegate to the 1860 Republican convention that surprised many by nominating former Congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois instead of Senator William H. Seward of New York. Strong Vincent then joined his father in campaigning hard for the Railsplitter that fall against Democratic nominee Stephen Douglas and a host of other contenders in what proved to be an incendiary election. The Vincents’ work paid off: Lincoln romped to victory in Erie County with more than seventy percent of the vote and carried the commonwealth with room to spare.

                                                            *

Even before the new president formally asked for volunteers to combat the South’s move toward secession, militia units sprung up all over Pennsylvania, including one originally known as the Wayne Guards in Erie County. Radical separatists began firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor at dawn on April 12, 1861. As soon as he heard of South Carolina’s belligerence, Strong Vincent – according to the research of George Deutsch, the former executive director of the Erie County Historical Society – joined what was now called the “Erie Regiment,” a 90-day enlistment unit organized by Colonel John W. McLane, an Erie native and veteran of the Mexican War. Although transferred to Pittsburgh to be closer to the early fighting in Virginia, the Erie Regiment missed First Bull Run and disbanded before seeing any action. McLane and Vincent, a newly commissioned second lieutenant, then organized a new northwestern Pennsylvania unit that ultimately became the 83rd Regiment. It stayed in the war for the duration.

Vincent persuaded Lizzie that they should get married before he was sent to the front lines. They were wed on April 25, 1861, at the Reformed Dutch Church in her family’s hometown, Jersey City, New Jersey. A week after the ceremony, Vincent was promoted to first lieutenant.

Oliver Norton, the bugler from Erie County, was among the 83rd’s early enlistees. “My first impression of [Vincent] was not favorable,” Norton recalled in his memoirs. “I thought him a dude and an upstart.”

But Norton’s perspective changed once he saw the first lieutenant in action on the drill field. “I soon came to know that he wished to impress on that mob of green country boys, by example as well as precept, the proper way for a soldier to stand and move. It was the beginning for the regiment of a military education.”

Vincent’s own military education was strengthened that fall by a series of tutorials on maneuvers and tactics taught by Colonel McLane. McLane’s protégé became such a stickler for detail and preparation that some of his charges viewed him as a martinet. On George Washington’s 130th birthday in February of ’62, Vincent read aloud to the regiment Washington’s famous Farewell Address.

Norton was far from the only private who worried that a well-bred “gentleman” like Vincent might cower when commanding men in battle. But it didn’t take long for Norton and comrades to recognize that Vincent could translate his insistence on discipline into effective action on the battlefield.

Another member of the 83rd who developed an intimate relationship with Vincent was the regiment’s eventual adjutant, First Lieutenant John M. Clark. Clark had been born in 1837 in Meadville, a village of some 3,000 people forty miles due south of Erie in Crawford County. He was 24-years-old when he signed up for the Erie Regiment and then re-upped with the 83rd. His father was a Scottish immigrant who’d moved his brood from a Connecticut farm to northwestern Pennsylvania. The elder Clark continued to farm in Meadville and also served as a justice of the peace. His son John studied at Allegheny College and clerked for an iron foundry and a pair of grocery establishments in Erie County before the war broke out.

Once the Erie Regiment was disbanded, word circulated in the area that Colonel McLane was organizing a new three-year enlistment outfit. A host of men from Warren County, for example, traveled to Erie to sign up in July and August. Some made the 60-mile trip by horse or horsedrawn wagon; others rode the Sunbury and Erie Rail Road, which had inaugurated passenger service in Warren two years earlier. Most of the Warren County men who joined what soon became the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment were assigned by McLane and Vincent to serve in Companies A and D.

Clark was among the Crawford Countians assigned to Company I. Soon enough, Second Lieutenant Clark became First Lieutenant. It appears he was elevated to regimental adjutant in the aftermath of the Gaines’ Mill melee in June of ’62. After Vincent became the 83rd’s head that fall, Clark became his right-hand man.

Vincent must have had implicit faith in the Scottish-American. Clark served as Vincent’s chief administrative and personnel officer. It was Clark’s job to manage Vincent’s paperwork and to ensure that orders from the brigade and divisional command were promptly carried out.

The Vincent-Clark partnership worked well in one battlefield crisis after another, especially during the nightmarish assault on – and retreat from – Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. Miraculously, both emerged more or less unscathed from one of the war’s most horrific killing fields.

                                                            *

The 83rd was officially mustered into service in September 1861, with McLane as its commanding officer and Vincent as his top aide. Most of its first year was spent in training, often in concert with its Third Brigade compatriot, the Albany-based 44th New York Infantry. The two regiments became so closely linked that they became known as “Butterfield’s Twins,” after their brigade and eventual division commander, General Butterfield, Oliver Norton’s songwriting partner.

The Twins’ baptism under fire came, sadly, in May and June of ‘62 in and around Hanover Court House, Virginia, amid Major General George McClellan’s ill-fated Peninsula Campaign. The Twins and other Union regiments were routed at Gaines’ Mill in what became known as the Battle of the Seven Days. McLane was killed in the Chickahominy wetlands along with five dozen other men from the 83rd. Two hundred more were wounded or captured.

Vincent missed the action at Gaines’ Mill because he had contracted “Chickahominy Fever” – a form of malaria that felled thousands of soldiers on both sides that spring and summer – and was confined to a field hospital bed. When Vincent got word that his regiment had been decimated, he defied doctor’s orders, jumped onto his horse, and raced off to Gaines’ Mill, arriving in time to see his bloodied men in full retreat. Vincent, still feverish, soon collapsed and had to be rushed back to the hospital. He nearly died, spending months in critical care. He was transported by medical boat to New York City, where he was met by his wife and father. The group then spent three weeks in Jersey City so Strong could be nursed at Lizzie’s family home. He improved enough to be taken home to Erie to continue his recovery.

It wasn’t until October 1st of ’62 that Vincent could rejoin the 83rd. The men were then encamped in Sharpsburg, Maryland, where most had been held in reserve at the Battle of Antietam two weeks earlier. Vincent was viewed in such high esteem that, even in his absence, the soldiers of the 83rd elected him their regimental commander.

Two months later at Fredericksburg, Vincent vindicated their faith. Once the Union high command realized its attack had failed, Vincent did a masterful job guiding his men off Marye’s Heights on a bitterly cold December night. He waited until the moon had been obscured by a cloud before ordering the retreat, undoubtedly saving many lives.

The men in the 83rd and other Third Brigade regiments had been so eviscerated at Fredericksburg that many were kept off of Chancellorsville’s front lines in early May of ’63. By the time it began marching north six weeks later for what became the Gettysburg campaign, the brigade had been refortified with men and equipment – and, as of June 28, had itself a new commanding officer.

Earlier that year, lawyer Vincent was offered the position of Judge Advocate for the Union Army. He turned down the appointment, telling his superiors that he had joined the military to fight, not litigate.

The magnitude of what was at stake brought out something in Vincent he may not have known he had. Raised in a strict Episcopal household and educated at Trinity and Harvard, he prided himself not only on his knowledge of history and literature but his grasp of moral urgency.

“Surely the right will prevail,” Vincent had written to Lizzie when he left for war in 1861. “If I live, we will rejoice over our country’s success. If I fall, remember, you have given your husband to the most righteous cause that ever widowed a woman.”

Now read party 2 on how it all ended here.

Timothy M. Gay is a Pulitzer-nominated author of five books and dozens of articles about history and culture. His most recent book is RORY LAND, which looks at the life of golf superstar Rory McIlroy through the prism of Ireland’s troubled past. A graduate of Georgetown University, Gay grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, the proud home of a host of Little Round Top heroes in the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment.

How Queen Victoria's Family Tree Spread Haemophilia Across Europe

Queen Victoria, who ruled Britain from 1837 to 1901 and became one of the most recognisable monarchs in modern history, had nine children. By the time she died in 1901, her descendants sat on the thrones of Russia, Spain, Germany, and several smaller European states. She was known, without irony, as the grandmother of Europe. What she was also, though nobody used the term at the time, was a carrier of haemophilia.

James Hollander explains.

Queen Victoria by Alexander Bassano, 1882. Glass copy negative, half-plate. Source: Public domain, available here.

This article’s sponsor is EasyGenogram – a great tool that allows you to map out family trees and relationships. We highly recommend you give it a try – and you can even see one for Queen Victoria below!

Three of Queen Victoria’s nine children inherited a mutation in the gene responsible for producing a clotting factor in the blood.

Males who inherited it could not stop bleeding from even minor injuries. Females carried it silently, with no symptoms, and passed it to their own children. Victoria herself showed nothing, and neither did Prince Albert, her husband and first cousin. There was no history of the condition anywhere in her family.

Geneticists today believe the mutation arose spontaneously, either in Victoria's own embryonic development or through her father, Edward, Duke of Kent. However it began, what followed from it touched the internal lives of three royal courts over the next sixty years.

The three who carried it

Of Victoria's sons, only Leopold, Duke of Albany, was affected. He lived carefully and with frequent difficulty; a bruise that would heal in days for anyone else could leave him bedridden for weeks. He died at thirty from a brain haemorrhage after a fall.

Of her daughters, two carried the mutation without knowing it: Princess Alice and Princess Beatrice. A third daughter, Helena, and the eldest, Victoria, Princess Royal, apparently escaped it. Edward VII's descendants (the main British royal line) were clear.

The condition passed through Alice and Beatrice into the courts they married into.

Carrier lines from Victoria through Alice and Beatrice to the affected descendants in Russia, Spain, and Germany. Created using EasyGenogram.

Alice's line: Russia and Germany

Alice married Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and had seven children.

Two of her daughters were carriers.

Irene married Prince Henry of Prussia; two of their sons, Waldemar and Heinrich, were haemophiliacs.

The more consequential line ran through Alix, who became Tsarina Alexandra of Russia after her marriage to Nicholas II.

Their only son, Tsarevich Alexei, born in 1904, was the heir to the Romanov throne. He was also severely affected. Episodes of internal bleeding could last for days. The condition was concealed from the Russian public, as the succession of the empire could not be seen to rest on a child who might not survive to adulthood.

That secrecy created space for Grigori Rasputin, a Siberian mystic who appeared, through methods nobody could fully account for, to calm Alexei's bleeding crises. His influence over Alexandra, and through her, over court appointments and decisions, became a source of serious political instability in the years leading up to 1917.

Beatrice's line: Spain

Beatrice's daughter, Victoria Eugenie, married King Alfonso XIII of Spain in 1906.

Two of their sons, Alfonso, Prince of Asturias and Infante Gonzalo, inherited the condition.

Both died young from bleeding following minor accidents; Gonzalo died in 1934, Alfonso four years later in 1938.

What the science confirmed

For most of the twentieth century, historians assumed the royal condition was Haemophilia A, the more common form.

But in 2009, genetic researchers analysed the remains of the Romanov family and identified a mutation in the F9 gene, confirming it was Haemophilia B, the rarer type, sometimes called Christmas disease. The scientific question was settled more than ninety years after Alexei's death.

By then, the affected lines had mostly ended. The Spanish branch died out. The Russian branch was executed in 1918. The German branch had lost its last known carrier during the Second World War. The mutation that entered the historical record through one woman in the 1840s had run its course across four generations and three royal courts.

Let us know what you think about Queen Victoria below.

Sources

• Wikipedia – Haemophilia in European royalty

• Rogaev et al. (2009), Science – "Genotype Analysis Identifies the Cause of the 'Royal Disease'"

• HemAware – "Why Is Haemophilia Called the Royal Disease?"

• Hemophilia of Georgia – "The Royal Disease: A Family History Update on Queen Victoria"

• unofficialroyalty.com – Royal Haemophilia Carriers

• unofficialroyalty.com – Royal Haemophilia Sufferers in Queen Victoria’s Descendants

Antietam and the Maryland Campaign: Part 1 – Background & The Lost Order

The Confederate victory at Second Manassas, August 28-30, 1862, followed victories in the Valley Campaign and the Peninsula. The casualties incurred by the Army of the Potomac included 14,000 killed or wounded of 62,000 engaged, compared to about half of that for the Army of Northern Virginia. Then, on September 1, Stonewall Jackson defeated a Union cohort retreating from the battlefield at Chantilly. General Pope was relieved of command and sent to Minnesota to deal with the Sioux, and was never again involved in the Civil War. Pope would blame Fitz-John Porter for the loss, even though that wasn’t the case; Porter would be heard from again at Antietam but would go through a devastating court martial soon after. One of Pope’s generals said of him, “Suffice to say ... that more insolence, superciliousness, ignorance, and pretentiousness were never combined in one man.”

In a multi-part series, here Lloyd W Klein looks at the background to Antietam and the Maryland Campaign.

General George B. McClellan. Source: Public domain, available here.

Situation: The Union

It would be hard to imagine what President Lincoln was going through after these battlefield defeats. After a year and a half of fighting, none of his generals had ever defeated the Rebels in the Eastern Theater, although General Halleck had done well enough in the west, thanks in large part to a crazy general named Sherman and a drunken one named Grant. The backbiting in the army was at full swing, the blockade was having only a moderate effect, and his diplomat to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, was afraid that PM Gladstone would force negotiations to end the conflict. The soldiers who had been enlisted for one year had now swerved their commitment, unless they wanted to re-enlist. Casualties were high, and there was a pervasive sense of incompetence at the top of the military leadership.

And even worse, General Lee was rumored to have crossed the Potomac on September 3rd. The United States was being invaded, the Union army had no commander, and the national mid-term elections were coming up in 2 months. No other POTUS has ever faced a crisis this serious, but then, no other president was Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln had removed McClellan as general-in-chief after the Peninsula Campaign and brought in John Pope from the west. McClellan had remained Commanding General of the AoP. In the early stages of his command, McClellan was able to build the Union army into a more powerful unit than the Confederacy had faced at Bull Run. He was a brilliant administrator, and he had created a well-trained and supplied army, had planned a clever strategy to take Richmond, and his army greatly admired him. Despite these organizational successes, his apparent slowness, almost an unwillingness, to fight a battle slowed the war beyond what Lincoln could politically accept. His repeated unforced retreats in the Peninsula led to a lack of confidence. Moreover, McClellan had shown great disrespect for Lincoln. Most presidents would not have made this decision. But now, Lincoln needed a general to meet an imminent threat, and he went back to McClellan as the best man available. McClellan was very popular among the soldiers and the officers. The parallels are very interesting with the one at the onset of the Gettysburg campaign, when Hooker was dismissed on the eve of battle during an invasion following a devastating loss in Virginia. But now, 6 months later, Lincoln grudgingly gave McClellan command of the full eastern theater. Give Lincoln credit: he chose the best man available, even though they didn’t mesh well.

Some believe that McClellan purposely withheld his men from helping Pope at Second Manassas.  In late August, two full corps of the Army of the Potomac had arrived in Alexandria, but McClellan would not allow them to advance to Manassas because of what he considered inadequate artillery, cavalry, and transportation support. He was accused by his political opponents of deliberately undermining the Pope's position. But he is especially criticized by historians for his letter to his wife on August 10, "Pope will be badly thrashed within two days & ... they will be very glad to turn over the redemption of their affairs to me. I won't undertake it unless I have full & entire control." He told Abraham Lincoln on August 29 that it might be wise "to leave Pope to get out of his scrape, and at once use all our means to make the capital perfectly safe". After his severe defeat, Pope was relieved of command, and McClellan was reinstated. Lee invaded Maryland. Antietam occurred just 3 weeks later.

Situation: General Lee

After Second Manassas, General Lee enjoyed widespread popular acclaim in the South, and the confidence of the president and his cabinet. He had thus far turned every battle into a victory, even those where he lost more men percentage-wise, defeating two Union commanders in just a few months. While supplies and armaments were in short supply, at this stage they seemed adequate.  It was a propitious moment to plan an invasion of the north. But with Autumn coming, Lee had to move quickly and efficiently.

He had two excellent Corps Commanders in Longstreet and Jackson. His division commanders were highly competent, but they were also high-spirited, and their personalities clashed with their superiors. Lee was a highly perceptive judge of people. Lee recognized that Stonewall Jackson thrived on independent action, especially attack situations, and he would place him in that position in the campaign. He also saw Longstreet as embodying an attacking defender, and used him for the main base of the army for that purpose.

After Second Manassas, the ANV could not be supplied by the farms in Northern Virginia. The Orange and Alexandria RR did not have the capacity; critical bridges were down. The Manassas Gap was nonfunctional from Front Royal in the Valley. A large Army could not be sustained any longer on the land of northern Virginia. Lee had to go somewhere else. Lee had these objectives with an invasion of the North:

·       to move the focus of fighting away from the South and into Federal territory, to feed and clothe the troops.

·       To forage for supplies

·       To recruit in western Maryland and bring secession-leaning citizens hope

·       Achieve a military victory in the north: Lee believed he could outwit McClellan on any battlefield, and that the right opportunity would show itself.

·       Confederate success would also influence impending Congressional elections in the North, perhaps forcing a negotiated settlement

·       Persuade European nations to recognize the Confederate States of America. 

His objectives were political and logistical, not military. Lee did not have on his immediate agenda an attempt to raid or capture Baltimore or Washington, D.C. This makes it appear as if Lee was merely wandering aimlessly around western Maryland. But there were insufficient resources to take and hold any northern city. In an insurgency, it isn’t necessary to do so.

Robert E Lee. Source: Public domain, available here.

Traditionally, General Lee has been given the credit for planning. Rossino has recently found evidence that the campaign was the culmination of planning that had been discussed at the highest levels in Richmond since June-July 1861, and that the invasion was ordered by Jefferson Davis to fulfill a mandate issues by the Confederate Congress in December 1861.

Although the idea for the invasion was well-conceived, many modern-day civil war enthusiasts think this was a terrible idea because the Confederacy should have stayed on defense, not fritter away its resources. But the period after 2nd Manassas was the single moment of the war that was their best window for a chance at achieving a military victory, when Lee was truly in the ascendancy. Indeed, if he hadn’t tried, history would judge him harshly. This likely was the real high-watermark of the Confederacy, a moment when another Confederate victory might have brought huge dividends.

Lee crossed the Potomac at two fords west of Washington.  His army moved to Frederick, camping in a field 2 miles south of the town at Best’s Farm. Lee started on September 4 by sending D.H. Hill’s division across the Potomac about 5 miles north of Leesburg. Stonewall Jackson followed Hill across the river on September 5, and led the march to Frederick, near which he camped on September 6.

As far as anyone knows, Lee didn’t have a defined military objective for the campaign. His issuance of a movement order after reaching Frederick is the only existing tactical plan. The rest is speculation, and he may well have thought that the Union Army was so disorganized that he could run wild in western Maryland for a long while. The Army of Northern Virginia’s objectives at the time of the Maryland operation included feeding and clothing the troops, in addition to attracting recruits from among Marylanders sympathetic to the Confederacy. General Lee also initially planned to forage for supplies in southern Pennsylvania until winter brought an end to the campaigning season, but he abandoned that goal within 48 hours of crossing the Potomac River.

Militarily speaking, Lee endeavored to draw the Federals out of Virginia by threatening Washington from the northwest. This he accomplished by forcing George McClellan to shift his men from northern Virginia to positions around D.C. above the Potomac. Lee then hoped to engage the Federals in a clash that would decide the end of the war.

These are the goals that Lee and others wrote about, but there was yet another overriding objective - pulling Maryland out of the Union. The Confederate government had made accomplishing this an explicit political goal in December 1861, when it passed a resolution relating to Maryland which Jefferson Davis signed. Lee also appears to have initially believed - as did many in his army - that simply marching into Maryland would encourage Secessionists in the state to rise up against the Lincoln administration.

The invasion was made based on tactical considerations only. Lee believed he could easily flank the enemy by crossing the Potomac upriver from Washington and marching the Army of Northern Virginia through Maryland. A short thrust into Union territory would not be enough; a prolonged, several-month stay would be the key to Confederate success. Lee hoped to keep his army on United States soil through much of the autumn, not to capture and hold territory but to gather resources and create chaos before returning to Virginia as winter approached.

Lee Invades the North

Lee wanted to use Leesburg as his stepping-off point to get to Frederick. The turnpike leading out of Snickers Gap goes to Leesburg. This turnpike was an old Indian trail that white settlers had widened and had become the main thoroughfare between the Shenandoah and Loudoun County. Up to this point, Lee was using main roads for supply lines, which was clever strategically, as there were no railroads except as connected to Harper’s Ferry.

Frederick, Maryland, is centrally placed between Washington and Baltimore. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad  set up a supply line to that town. It is also well located to Harper’s Ferry. And, it was the new capital of Maryland when it was removed from Baltimore. There is good water nearby at the Monocacy River, and there is abundant farmland, so it is a great base.

In September 1862, Confederate forces crossed the Potomac River at several places. Here are the main crossing points utilized by Lee's army before the Battle of Antietam:

·       White's Ford: Located near Leesburg, Virginia, White's Ford was the major crossing point used by Lee's army as they entered Maryland (see drawing). They crossed the Potomac River here on September 4-6, 1862, and began their advance into Union territory.

·       Cheek’s Ford: Upstream of White’s Ford, was used by DH Hill’s forces.

·       Noland's Ferry: Situated downstream from White's Ford, Noland's Ferry was another crossing point used by Lee's forces. They crossed the Potomac here on September 7-8, 1862, continuing their movement into Maryland.

McClellan Responds

General McClellan assumed command of an army that was truly leaderless. Lincoln had intentionally diffused power so that no single mistake could be ruinous, but that had led to no one being capable of bold action. When McClellan took charge of the Union forces on Sept. 2, he inherited four separate armies, thousands of untrained recruits, and numerous other small commands that needed to be made ready in a hurry. To further complicate matters, three of the AoP’s senior commanders had been relieved of duty, charged with insubordination.

McClellan knew that Lee was in his northwest and moved in that direction. By the time he arrived in Frederick on September 13, Lee had been gone for 4 days. Classic histories portray McClellan's army as moving lethargically, averaging only 6 miles a day.

Lee was moving west to attack Harpers Ferry, which is west of Frederick. He was not moving east to advance on the big eastern cities. Had General Lee attacked any of the major cities, his lack of resources would have been immediately obvious. His supply lines were too tenuous to try: he couldn’t have held these cities, in any case. His goal was to goad Union generals into battles.

Harpers Ferry was a critical strategic point early in the war. It was the north-south crossroads from the Shenandoah Valley to Western Maryland, and the joining of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. It contained a large arsenal and was a concentration for military manufacturers. All of these factors played key roles in why it was a crucial military goal. In fact, control of the town changed 8 times during the war, remaining in Union control for most of it.

Surrounded on three sides by steep heights, the terrain surrounding the town made it nearly impossible to defend; all one had to do with take the heights and shell the town until it surrendered. Stonewall Jackson once said he would rather “take the place 40 times than undertake to defend it once.”

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal were crucial supply lines connecting the east with the west, and they ran right through town. These assets were the real reasons why Harpers Ferry was so strategically important.  If you take Harpers Ferry, the railroad is cut in half and supplies can’t be moved to the west without a large detour. And most importantly, Lee could then use this town as his supply depot for further operations deeper into Maryland.

McClellan commanded in theory 28 cavalry regiments. But the disastrous Manassas campaign had worn out the horses of almost half the Union regiments, while most of the remainder were stranded at Hampton Roads by gale-force winds. For the first week of the campaign, McClellan could only count on perhaps 1,500 cavalry from two regiments and a few scattered squadrons from his old army to challenge some 5,000 Confederate cavalry soldiers screening Lee’s army.General Franklin’s Sixth Corps troops captured the signal station atop Sugar Loaf Mountain on September 11. By that time, information had already come in from other sources, including Governor Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania, reporting that Lee’s army had marched away from Frederick in the direction of Hagerstown. McClellan knew within 24 hours, or perhaps even less, that Lee’s army was on the move.

First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), Virginia, 1861. Source: Public domain, available here.

Special Order Number 191

Lee and a large part of the Confederate Army bivouacked on the Best Farm, about 4 miles south of Frederick, near the Monocacy River. This site would 2 years later be the location of the Battle of Monocacy, but on September 9, 1862, the Union army was not close to Frederick. General Lee set up headquarters in an oak grove on the farm and dictated orders to a subordinate who laid out the campaign for the next week. Numbered Special Order No. 191, headquarters distributed these orders using couriers who brought copies to the commanders of the army’s wings and divisions.

General Robert E. Lee issued Special Order No. 191, known as “The Lost Order”, on September 9, 1862, during the Maryland Campaign to his corps commanders directing their movements. In Special Order #191, General Lee outlined the routes to be taken and the timing for the attack of Harpers Ferry. It provided specific details of the movements his army would take during the invasion of Maryland.

******************************************************************************

“Special Orders, No. 191

Hdqrs. Army of Northern Virginia

September 9, 1862

The citizens of Fredericktown being unwilling while overrun by members of this army, to open their stores, to give them confidence, and to secure to officers and men purchasing supplies for benefit of this command, all officers and men of this army are strictly prohibited from visiting Fredericktown except on business, in which cases they will bear evidence of this in writing from division commanders. The provost-marshal in Fredericktown will see that his guard rigidly enforces this order.

Major Taylor will proceed to Leesburg, Virginia, and arrange for transportation of the sick and those unable to walk to Winchester, securing the transportation of the country for this purpose. The route between this and Culpepper Court-House east of the mountains being unsafe, will no longer be traveled. Those on the way to this army already across the river will move up promptly; all others will proceed to Winchester collectively and under command of officers, at which point, being the general depot of this army, its movements will be known and instructions given by commanding officer regulating further movements.

The army will resume its march tomorrow, taking the Hagerstown road. General Jackson's command will form the advance, and, after passing Middletown, with such portion as he may select, take the route toward Sharpsburg, cross the Potomac at the most convenient point, and by Friday morning take possession of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, capture such of them as may be at Martinsburg, and intercept such as may attempt to escape from Harpers Ferry.

General Longstreet's command will pursue the same road as far as Boonsborough, where it will halt, with reserve, supply, and baggage trains of the army.

General McLaws, with his own division and that of General R. H. Anderson, will follow General Longstreet. On reaching Middletown will take the route to Harpers Ferry, and by Friday morning possess himself of the Maryland Heights and endeavor to capture the enemy at Harpers Ferry and vicinity.

General Walker, with his division, after accomplishing the object in which he is now engaged, will cross the Potomac at Cheek's Ford, ascend its right bank to Lovettsville, take possession of Loudoun Heights, if practicable, by Friday morning, Key's Ford on his left, and the road between the end of the mountain and the Potomac on his right. He will, as far as practicable, cooperate with General McLaws and Jackson, and intercept retreat of the enemy.

General D. H. Hill's division will form the rear guard of the army, pursuing the road taken by the main body. The reserve artillery, ordnance, and supply trains, &c., will precede General Hill.

General Stuart will detach a squadron of cavalry to accompany the commands of Generals Longstreet, Jackson, and McLaws, and, with the main body of the cavalry, will cover the route of the army, bringing up all stragglers that may have been left behind.

The commands of Generals Jackson, McLaws, and Walker, after accomplishing the objects for which they have been detached, will join the main body of the army at Boonsborough or Hagerstown.

Each regiment on the march will habitually carry its axes in the regimental ordnance—wagons, for use of the men at their encampments, to procure wood &c.

By command of General R. E. Lee

R.H. Chilton, Assistant Adjutant General”

******************************************************************************

The point of these movement orders was to put Lee’s invasion into motion. Jackson was to take Harpers Ferry while the rest of Lee's army was posted at Boonsboro under the command of Maj. Gen. James Longstreet. DH Hill was designated to guard the rear. General Longstreet was to encircle the towns and roads leading to Harpers Ferry. The places where parts of the army were sent controlled the roads into and out of Harpers Ferry. Martinsburg holds the road across from Whites Ford. Boonsboro hold the road north of Harpers Ferry.  Once Lee’s various divisions were in place, Harpers Ferry was in essence surrounded.

Lee hoped that after taking Harper's Ferry to secure his rear, he could create chaos in western Maryland, wrecking the Monocacy aqueduct, before turning his attention to Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Washington, D.C. itself. Lee did not expect to be attacked by McClellan at this vulnerable moment. He was hiding at Boonsboro precisely to keep McClellan guessing. He could not know that McClellan knew where he was. Lee is not looking to bring on a large battle, and he knew McClellan must be somewhere behind him, so he was going in the opposite direction. What Lee would like is to operate surreptitiously and attack bits and pieces of the Union Army.

The Lost Order

Soldiers of the Union Army found a copy of this order in a field on September 13. The military intelligence gained allowed General George McClellan to advance his army with confidence, and thus was a decisive element in the Battles of South Mountain and Antietam.

In Special Order #191, General Lee outlined the routes to be taken and the timing for the attack on Harpers Ferry. It provided specific details of the movements his army would take during the invasion of Maryland. The crucial point was that Lee divided his army, which he planned to regroup later.  The order directed Major General Stonewall Jackson to move his corps to Martinsburg while McLaws's and Walker's divisions "endeavored to capture Harpers Ferry." Major General James Longstreet was to move his corps northward to Boonsborough. Major General DH Hill's division was to act as rearguard on the march from Frederick.

DH Hill’s camp was just over one mile to the southwest of Lee’s HQ, along a small watercourse named Ballenger’s Creek. To be clear, there is no evidence that Lee’s HQ sent a courier to Hill bearing a copy of Special Orders No. 191. The traditional story differs greatly from what recent scholarship by Alex Rossino has more recently uncovered.

Traditional Story: Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. Chilton, Lee’s assistant adjutant general (chief of staff), wrote out 8 copies of the order, 1 to each of the generals named and 1 to President Davis. At the time that Special Order #191 was written, Hill was under the command of Jackson, his brother-in-law. Jackson personally copied the document for Hill because once the army crossed into Maryland, the order specified that Hill was to exercise independent command as the rear guard. For this reason, Jackson copied and sent Hill the order because he didn’t know if Chilton had done so. But, since Special Order #191 conveyed Hill’s having an independent command once entering Maryland, Chilton had in fact sent Hill a copy. DH Hill received only the copy from General Jackson, in the general’s writing, and never received the copy written by Chilton. Since he had received his orders, no one was concerned at the time that a copy had been lost. The traditional story is that somewhere in that 1 mile ride, a courier delivering Lee’s order to DH Hill somehow lost it.

Updated Version Uncovered by Dr Rossino: Contrary to the assertions found in numerous texts, the lost copy was not dispatched by Lee. It is claimed that McClellan verified its authenticity based on the signature of Robert Chilton, which would have originated from Lee's headquarters. The version sent by Jackson successfully reached its destination, enabling Hill to understand his directives; however, this also contributed to the Confederates' unawareness of the lost copy from Lee. The lost document consisted of movement orders for D.H. Hill issued from army headquarters but was never transmitted. Research by Rossino indicates that the copy was likely created by Armistead L. Long rather than Robert Chilton, as the handwriting and signature on the lost document do not correspond with the official records that Chilton authored and signed. The reason for the creation of this additional copy remains unclear, although it is posited that Long either prepared it for Jeb Stuart or was instructed by Lee to do so when the cavalry commander visited headquarters on the afternoon of September 9. Stuart subsequently misplaced the order on September 12, yet he was not held accountable for this oversight since Hill's name was affixed to the document.

Np one really knows who lost the order found by the Union soldiers. In the traditional story, only Chilton’s courier, Hill’s staff, or Hill himself could have been the culprit who lost the orders. A frequently postulated possibility is that Hill did receive both orders and lost one of them.  After the war, this was the standard belief, but Hill always denied it. He even sent a letter to General Lee after the war detailing the events and asking for clarification, as he did not know what happened. Hill defended himself after the war vociferously. He knew his orders would come from Jackson, so the fact that none came from Lee did not surprise him. Hill famously carried the copy he had received in his pocket to show to everyone that he, indeed, had kept his copy of the orders. He claimed that he had pinned his version in his pocket, knowing of its importance. His chief of staff always maintained that only one version was received.

It seems self-evident that the critical clue is this: How did such an important document end up in a field wrapped around three cigars, still in the original envelope? A logical conclusion is that the last person to possess these items must have been a cigar smoker, which DH Hill was not. Several individuals, including myself, have speculated that Henry Kyd Douglas, a courier on Jackson’s staff, is the most likely suspect; he was known to smoke cigars and was present in Lee’s camp. However, in his memoirs, he made no mention of that particular day. Ultimately, this identification hinges on the existence of a courier.

That morning, the 27th Indiana rested in a meadow which had served as the site of a Confederate camp a few days before. It was there that the infamous envelope was discovered. Two Union soldiers, Corporal Barton W. Mitchell and First Sergeant John M. Bloss of the 27th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, found an official-looking envelope wrapped around 3 cigars. Around noon on September 13, a Union soldier on a skirmish line found an envelope. On opening it, Corporal Barton W. Mitchell of the 27th Indiana Volunteers, part of the Union XII Corps, found 3 cigars inside wrapped in a note. Mitchell did not read every word, but he noticed that it concluded with the phrase "By command of General Robert E. Lee” and was signed “R.H. Chilton, Assistant Adjutant General".

Mitchell recognized the significance of the document and showed it immediately to Sergeant John M. Bloss. The note was elevated up the 27th Indiana's chain of command: to Captain Peter Kop, Colonel Silas Colgrove, then to Brigadier General Alpheus Williams, commander of the 1st Division,  XII Corps. I told you we would hear from him again. And we are not yet done with his contributions.

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Sarah Tyson Rorer and America's Food Safety Revolution

Most Americans today rarely think about the basic rules of food safety. Vegetables are washed before cooking. Milk is refrigerated. Kitchen counters are wiped down without much thought. Recipes come with precise measurements and expiration dates guide daily decisions. These habits feel so routine that they appear timeless, but, they are not. Here, Eric Schubert explains the important role of Sarah Tyson Rorer and America’s food safety revolution.

Sarah Tyson Rorer.

At the turn of the twentieth century Americans were navigating a food system changing faster than their understanding of it. Cities were expanding rapidly and food increasingly traveled long distances before reaching consumers. Milk, meat, and produce passed through a growing chain of handlers. Refrigeration remained limited food inspection laws were inconsistent, and germ theory was still filtering into everyday life. The consequences were immediate. Milk carried disease, meat spoiled quickly, and markets varied widely in cleanliness. For many households, the kitchen had become a place of uncertainty rather than comfort.

Long before federal agencies regulated food production and decades before food safety became government policy Americans often turned elsewhere for guidance. One of the most influential voices was Sarah Tyson Rorer, an educator, lecturer, and cookbook author who helped millions understand how food preparation sanitation and nutrition affected health. Though largely forgotten today, she helped shape what became the modern American kitchen.

Mrs. Rorer Arrives

Born Sarah Tyson Heston in 1849, Rorer grew up during a period when food and health were increasingly linked in public thinking. Later accounts often repeated a story that her mother used diet to manage her father’s illness. Whether fully accurate or not it reflected a broader nineteenth century belief that food could function as medicine and that the kitchen played a central role in health.

Her rise began in 1882 with the founding of the Philadelphia Cooking School. While cooking schools existed before Rorer’s institution emphasized something different. It focused on principles rather than recipes alone. Students learned nutrition sanitation household management and food preparation as part of a structured system of instruction. Cooking was reframed as discipline rather than tradition. This aligned with broader changes in American life where expertise standardization and efficiency were reshaping industry medicine and education. Rorer positioned the kitchen within that same modern framework. It was not separate from scientific progress but an extension of it applied to everyday life!

The Kitchen as a Laboratory

Rorer’s influence came from precision and repetition. Earlier recipes often relied on vague measures and inherited assumptions that varied widely between households. A ‘handful’ or a ‘cup’ could differ dramatically depending on the cook. Rorer replaced this uncertainty with standardized instructions and repeatable methods. Ingredients were measured carefully and procedures were written so that results could be reproduced in any home. The goal was consistency and reliability across households that shared no common training. The kitchen in her view should function with the same order and discipline as a laboratory!

In works such as Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book and Diet for the Sick she consistently linked food preparation to health outcomes, an example being cleanliness, freshness, and proper handling of ingredients were not optional details. They were essential to preventing illness and supporting recovery.

America's First Food Influencer

Rorer reached audiences far beyond Philadelphia by mastering the expanding media landscape of her time. She wrote for widely-read publications including Ladies’ Home Journal, published cookbooks that circulated nationally, delivered lectures, and conducted cooking demonstrations across the United States. Her advice reached thousands of households simultaneously and helped define how Americans understood domestic responsibility in an age of rapid change.

In effect, she became one of the first nationally recognized food authorities and dieticians in the United States. Her public presence extended to major national exhibitions, including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis where ideas about modern living and domestic science were showcased on a national stage. By the early twentieth century, “Mrs. Rorer” had become a familiar name in American households.

Before Federal Regulation

Rorer’s career unfolded during a period when food regulation in the United States was still developing. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was not published until 1906, and meaningful federal oversight of food production would take years to fully emerge. In this gap between scientific knowledge and government regulation, education played a central role. It is why “Mrs. Rorer”, in part, was so successful. Again, all these ideas may appear ordinary today but at the time they marked a significant shift in expectations about domestic life.

Conclusion

By the time Sarah Tyson Rorer died in 1937 near Mount Gretna and Colebrook in Pennsylvania, the world she had helped shape was already being reorganized. Domestic science had moved into universities and home economics departments while government agencies assumed larger roles in food regulation and public health. The era of the traveling domestic educator was fading. Her influence remained visible in everyday practice, though. The expectation that recipes should be precise, that kitchens should be sanitary, and that food preparation has direct implications for health, all reflect changes she helped bring into the mainstream. “Mrs. Rorer’ did not invent modern food safety, but she played a central role in teaching Americans how to live with it.

The history of public health is often told through laboratories laws and institutions. Sarah Tyson Rorer reminds us that it was also shaped in kitchens through cookbooks lectures and the daily labor of households adapting to a rapidly changing world. Long before food safety became federal policy it became a daily practice and she helped make that possible. Her significance lay not in generating scientific breakthroughs, but in translating scientific ideas into practical household routines that ordinary families could follow.

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Sources

Levenstein, Harvey. Revolution at the Table The Transformation of the American Diet, Oxford University Press (1988).

Rorer, Sarah Tyson. Good Cooking. Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Company, (1898).

Rorer, Sarah Tyson. Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book Arnold and Company (1902).

Rorer, Sarah Tyson. Diet for the Sick Arnold and Company (1917).

Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, Farrar Straus and Giroux (1986).

The Lexington Intelligencer (August 10, 1917). Sarah Tyson Rorer: Great Food Expert.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Sarah Tyson Heston Rorer." New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 31, 2026.

Weigley, Emma Seifrit. Sarah Tyson Rorer The Nation’s Instructress in Dietetics and Cookery American Philosophical Society (1977)

Bio:

Eric Schubert is a public historian, internationally featured genealogist, and human identification expert as seen on Good Morning America, People Magazine, and more. As a White-House Historical Association Next-Gen Leader, his public history work focuses on Presidential history and local biography topics throughout Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. His Master’s Thesis topic from Millersville University of Pennsylvania “Barr Spangler (1822-1922) and the Prohibition Party of Pennsylvania” was awarded by the Pennsylvania Historical Association, he contributed to the award-winning documentary “The Prospect For Freedom” on Civil Rights Trailblazer W. Miller Barbour (1908-1957), and he has conducted extensive research on Sarah Tyson Rorer.

Why Were Time Zones Were Created by American Railroads in 1883?

Before November 18, 1883, noon in New York was not noon in Philadelphia. Not noon in Pittsburgh. Not noon in Chicago. Each city kept its own time, measured against the position of the sun directly overhead that town, that day. This was not a flaw. It was how time had always worked. Here, Ali Mujtaba Zaidi looks at the change.

A 1948 map of standard time zones of the United States.

In the US in 1883, the different times in different cites made railroads dangerous.

A passenger leaving Boston in the 1870s carried a watch set to Boston time. At Providence, the station clock showed something slightly different. At New Haven, different again. By the time the train reached New York, a traveler paying close attention had passed through four or five quietly disagreeing versions of the same afternoon. Most people found this mildly irritating. Railroad schedulers found it a genuine operational nightmare.

Conductors often carried small handwritten conversion tables in their breast pockets, noting the difference between their company's internal clock and whichever local time the next station was running on. A few minutes here. Eight minutes there. It sounds trivial. On a single-track line with two trains moving toward each other from opposite ends, it was not trivial at all.

The Fragmentation Problem

By the early 1870s, the United States had somewhere between 50 and 80 separate railroad time standards running simultaneously. Some estimates go higher, depending on how you count regional variations and company-specific practices. No authoritative single number exists. What does exist is a picture of fragmentation serious enough that the Railroad Gazette, which tracked industry operations closely, was publishing regular complaints about it through the 1870s.

The safety concern was specific. Single-track railroads, which described most American rail infrastructure at the time, required trains traveling opposite directions to pass at designated sidings. That coordination depended entirely on agreed timing. If a stationmaster in one town and a stationmaster forty miles away were working from clocks even three or four minutes apart, the margin for error on a high-speed approach shrank considerably.

Collision records from the period are difficult to analyze cleanly. Mechanical failures, poor track conditions, and miscommunication caused most accidents, and historians are rightly cautious about attributing too many disasters to timing alone. But the rail industry itself identified clocking inconsistencies as a contributing factor in enough incidents that by the late 1870s, reform was no longer a theoretical debate. It was an economic and safety priority.

The resistance to solving it was partly political, partly institutional. Each railroad company had built its own internal timekeeping standard, often based on the solar time of its headquarters city. Adopting a rival company's time standard felt, to many managers, like a concession. Who sets the reference clock was also a question about whose city, whose meridian, whose commercial center stood at the center of the network.

The Man With the Proposal

William Frederick Allen did not invent the idea of time zones. Several astronomers and geographers had proposed versions of the concept through the 1860s and 1870s, including the Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming, whose advocacy for global standardized time ran through the same decade. What Allen did was take a workable version of the idea and spend years making it acceptable to the people who actually controlled American rail operations.

Allen was secretary of the General Time Convention, a body representing the major American railroad companies. His position was essentially that of a technical administrator and industry diplomat. He had access to the people whose agreement he needed. He also understood the practical constraints well enough to design a proposal that asked rail operators to give up as little as possible while gaining the coordination they needed.

The compromise he eventually brought to the table divided the continental United States into four time zones, each one hour apart, pegged to specific meridians. Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific. The boundaries were drawn to follow existing railroad operating regions as closely as practical, which meant they were not perfectly aligned with longitude in every case. They still aren't.

Some city newspapers resisted. Detroit refused to adopt standard time for years. A handful of municipalities held out on principle, arguing that the federal government had not actually mandated anything, which was technically true. Congress had not passed a law. No executive order had been issued. The railroads, as a private industry consortium, had simply decided on the change and implemented it. The rest of the country followed because the railroad schedule was now the most authoritative clock in most people's lives. If your town clock didn't match the station clock, you would miss your train.

November 18, 1883

At noon Eastern Standard Time on November 18, 1883, railroad station clocks across the country were adjusted. Telegraph operators, who were also the communication backbone of rail operations, had coordinated the synchronization. Some stations had to move their clocks forward. Some had to move them back. In a few cities, the adjustment was significant enough that the same afternoon briefly contained two noons, one solar and one standard, about sixteen minutes apart in some cases.

Chicago's adjustment was memorable enough to get newspaper coverage. The city's clocks were moved back nine minutes and thirty-two seconds to align with the new Central time standard. A reporter for the Chicago Tribune noted that two separate stroke-of-noon signals came from different city clocks that day, and that pedestrians near the Board of Trade briefly stopped to figure out which one to trust.

Most people simply reset their watches and continued with their afternoon.

The federal government took another 35 years to formally recognize what the railroads had created. The Standard Time Act of 1918 made the four-zone system law, largely because the First World War had made coordinating national logistics across incompatible regional times an obvious liability. For those 35 years between 1883 and 1918, standard time in the United States was a corporate convention, not a legal one. Society had adopted it, practically and almost entirely, because it was more convenient than the alternative.

What This Actually Changed

The railroad companies were not trying to reshape how Americans experienced their days. They were not, as some later commentators have suggested, attempting to impose industrial discipline on an agrarian population attached to solar rhythms. That interpretation is not entirely wrong, but it reverses the causation. The companies were trying to stop trainsfrom crashing into each other. The larger social consequences came afterward and were largely unplanned.

Once synchronized time existed as infrastructure, other institutions built on top of it. Factory shift schedules became easier to coordinate between sites. Banks in different cities could agree on a common closing hour. Telegraph servicesthat operated nationally needed a single temporal reference for message timestamps. Each of these adaptations reinforced the standard, made defection from it more costly, and gradually turned a railroad scheduling solution into something that felt like a natural feature of reality.

This is how most large infrastructure changes actually settle into a society. Not through a single dramatic moment of adoption, but through accumulated dependency, each new use case making the underlying standard harder to dislodge.

The Inheritance

The time zone structure that Allen's 1883 compromise created has been modified at the edges many times since. International conferences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries extended the logic globally. Individual countries have shifted zones for political reasons. A handful of places use half-hour or quarter-hour offsets that fit awkwardly inside the original framework. China officially observes a single time zone across a landmass that geographically spans five.

But the basic architecture is the same. The world runs on a grid of standardized longitudinal bands, each offset from a reference meridian by a fixed number of hours, the direct descendant of what four railroad companies and one patient industry secretary agreed to in the autumn of 1883.

Standard time, which most people now experience as an unalterable fact of the physical world, is younger than the telephone. The telephone was patented in 1876. Standard time came seven years later. People alive in 1883 had spent their entire lives in a world where every town kept its own time as a matter of course, where the question "what time is it here?" had a genuinely local answer, and where the idea of a single synchronized clock across an entire continent would have seemed either visionary or absurd, depending on who you asked.

That the change happened within a single generation, driven by the operational needs of one industry, and was absorbed so completely that most people today can't name its origin date, says something worth thinking about. Not about railroads specifically. About how quietly the structures that organize daily life get built, and how invisible they become once they work.

Did you find that piece interesting? If so, sign-up with us and get a free book by clicking here.

References

Allen, William F. History of the Adoption of Standard Time. American Railway Association, 1884.

Bartky, Ian R. Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America. Stanford University Press, 2000.

O'Malley, Michael. Keeping Watch: A History of American Time. Viking, 1990.

Prerau, David. Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time. Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005.

The Historical Insights, Why Time Zones Were Created in 1883: https://thehistoricalinsights.page/2026/04/why-time-zones-were-created-1883.html

About the Author: Ali Mujtuba Zaidi is a civil engineering scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia and the lead researcher for The Historical Insights, an independent publication focused on forgotten logistics, historical infrastructure, and systems history.

The History of the German Colonial Empire Before World War 1

The 19th and the early 20th century were characterized by the major powers of Europe possessing massive, worldwide colonial empires. Often, when people think of colonial powers, popular imagery depicts the British Empire, one of the largest in history, or the French Empire. But as many empires rise and dominate, many more are short-lived but equally as impactful, with one such being the colonial empire of Germany from 1871, when the nation was unified, to the 1stWorld War.

Harrison West explains.

Four German soldiers in a camel patrol in German South West Africa. Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 105-DSWA0095 / Walther Dobbertin / CC-BY-SA 3.0, available here.

The German Empire

Germany lies at the center of Europe, rich in culture and dense history going back to Neolithic settlers thousands of years ago. At the turn of the 20th century, Germany was a constitutional monarchy under the leadership of Kaiser Wilhelm II, with Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg leading the executive, and the parliament (the Reichstag), having limited power. The state capital was Berlin, with cities like Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne and more being large hubs of industry. By 1914, the German Empire was the largest economic power in all of Europe, ahead of nations like Britain in world trade, and becoming a dominant player in the global export of steel and electrical equipment. The empire was one of Europe’s fastest-growing nations, with major population increases, urbanization, and being a leader in the manufacturing of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and electrical engineering. On the downside, industrial workers faced restricted political rights, leading many to support socialist parties. And internationally, a system of alliances had isolated the country, with poor relations with France, Russia and Britain, but it did have allies in the form of Austria-Hungary, and Germany was pursuing global expansion to secure national prestige, economic resources, and geopolitical power. Another reason was to rival that of the British and the French. Officially proclaimed in the 1880s, by 1914, the German Colonial Empire spanned from the rainforests of Cameroon to the small islands, like Samoa and the Marshalls, deep in the Pacific Ocean.

Colonial administration of the colonies was through either direct decrees from the Kaiser, or, if not imperial, cases could be issued by the Colonial Office, and then the Reichstag could issue laws regarding Germans. Colonial organization and self-governance depending on the influence of the colony.

African Colonies

Kamerun

Kamerun was a protectorate in central Africa, under the leadership of Governor Karl Ebermaier; its territory spans over modern-day Cameroon, Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, Gabon and Congo. The protectorate was first established in August 1884 after German explorers signed a treaty with local chiefs in the region during the scramble for Africa. Over time, the colonial capital shifted three times, with Jaunde (present-day Yaoundé) serving as the capital by 1914. The colony’s main exports were rubber, palm oil, palm kernels, cocoa, and bananas, produced through cash-crop plantations that relied on forced and harsh labor. The infrastructure of the colony comprised two major railways, which the colony relied heavily on as road construction was minimal, and ports such as Duala, with the colonial population being 4.645 million by 1912. Military-wise, there was the Schutztruppe (protection troops), which comprised 1,855 men—mostly Africans soldiers led by German officers—and 1,530 armed police. Inside the colony, German was the official language, but Basaa, Beti, Duala, and other local languages were common. Many local communities fiercely protected their sovereignty, leading to various forms of resistance against the Germans.

Togoland

Togoland was a protectorate in West Africa, at the time under the leadership of Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg, from 1912 until August 1914, when Hans Georg von Doering became acting governor. This colony spans modern-day Ghana and Togo, with this colony first being established in the same year as Kamerun, by the same method, during the scramble for Africa. Similar to Kamerun, the colonial capital also shifted three times over the course of its history, with Lomé being the capital since 1897, and considered one of the prettiest cities in West Africa at the time. This colony mainly exported similar goods as Kamerun, but also cotton and coffee, with efforts to make Togoland a cotton-producing hub, but it failed to meet Germany’s needs, and the plantations for these goods were also cash crops manned by forced laborers. Regarding infrastructure, Tongoland possessed three major railway lines connecting Lomé to the colony’s interior, with the capital also being the principal port. The population of the colony was estimated to have numbered roughly 920,000, with the official language being German, but local languages like Ewe, Kotokoli and Kabye were also common, and other European languages such as French and English were used as a trade language. A small police force numbering 1,500 by 1914 was stationed to protect the colony, with this force mainly comprising Africans and very few Germans. Life in the colony varied with traditional structures, beliefs, and practices remaining central to the lives of many, with some local resistance rising to combat the harsh colonial treatment of the Germans.

German East Africa

German East Africa that spans over what is now the modern-day African nations of Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda. By 1914, the colony was under the leadership of Governor Heinrich Schnee, with the colonial capital being the city of Dar es Salaam in present-day Tanzania. The colony was established in 1885 during the scramble for Africa via treaties with local chiefs and sending warships to cement claims against the Sultan of Zanzibar. The main exports of this colony include Sisal, which was the largest source of income for plantations, coffee, rubber and other agricultural products like hides and oil seeds. The majority of these goods were sold to places like Britain and Australia, with only some being shipped back to the German homeland. The main backbone for transportation in the colony was railways, with two main lines, one connecting the capital to the coast, whilst the other connected the ports to the highlands. Roads were present, but mainly used for administrative needs, rather than for the general public. The population of the colony was around 7.7  million, with German being the official language, but many local languages, like Arabic, Swahili and Kirundi, were also commonly spoken. For defense, the Schutztruppe numbered 14,700 men in strength, with 3,000 of them being Europeans. Similar to Togoland, life here was a mixture of traditional, native practices and culture, and brutal German colonial control that prioritized the establishment of cash crops.

German South West Africa

German South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) was the final German colony on the African continent for their overseas colonial empire. The Germans had a presence there as early as 1883, leading to the establishment of a protectorate the next year to prevent British encroachment. By 1914, the governor of the colony was Theodor Seitz, with the colonial capital being Windhuk. The main exports of this colony were diamonds, copper, hides and produce coming from cattle. The transport for this was done by railways, the backbone of transportation infrastructure in the German colonies in Africa, as we have seen, with these rails connecting the interior to ports along the coast. The total population of the colony by 1914 was around as much as 200,000, with the majority being native Africans, and the official language was German, with local languages like Afrikaans and Khoekhoegowab also being commonly spoken. Life in this colony varied, with the indigenous people facing dispossession, forced labor, and genocide, which even led to a genocide in 1904 after an uprising against German authorities. Meanwhile, for German settlers, life was mixed, with settlers celebrating traditional German holidays, including beer and bratwurst culture, but life was often harsh, forcing many to take up many trades. By 1914, the colonial defenses comprised 3,000 soldiers of the Schutztruppe and 6,000  reservists.

Pacific & Asian Colonies

German New Guinea

Moving beyond the lands of Africa, we have the vast Pacific islands, starting with German New Guinea. The Germans claimed the territory in 1884, partly to challenge British interests in the Pacific, and it was originally administered by the  New Guinea Company until 1899, when the state took over control. This territory included the northeastern part of the island (Kaiser-Wilhelmsland), the Bismarck Archipelago, the islands of Buka and Bougainville in the northern parts of the Solomon Islands chain, Palau, the Caroline Islands, Nauru, the Mariana Islands & the Marshall Islands. Regarding the land beyond New Guinea, the Solomons & Bismarck’s, those were bought from the Spanish in the late 1800s. By 1914, the colony was under the administration of Eduard Haber, with the colonial capital being Simpsonhafen (present-day Rabaul) on the island of New Pomerania (New Britain). The main export commodities of this colony were copra, rubber and other products grown in plantations, along with minerals like copper and phosphates. Infrastructure varied tremendously throughout the islands, with a main focus on maritime transportation to trading ports along the coast, but due to the tropical and mountainous environment of New Guinea, road infrastructure was very limited.

By 1914, the population of the colony numbered around 600,000, with the majority being native people, and a fraction being Asian or European, with the official language being German, but Papuan and Austronesian languages were also common in the vast islands. Life amongst the colony varied, with the Germans heavily enforcing plantation expansion, forcing local inhabitants into labor, with coastal and island settlements experiencing some development, European presence remained limited, especially in the interior of New Guinea. German New Guinea itself was defended by a light force of 240 Melanesian Polizeitruppe and 61 German officers, all cantered around protecting Simpsonhafen.

German Samoa

German Samoa was the farthest extent of the German colonial empire, comprising modern-day Samoa; it was nearly double the distance from Germany itself compared to German South West Africa (Namibia). This territory was acquired at the turn of the century, after a civil war saw the Samoan islands divided up between the Germans and the Americans (the British were initially interested but withdrew). By 1914, the colonial capital was Apia on Upolu Island, with the protectorate being under the leadership of Erich Schultz-Ewerth. Similar to New Guinea, the main export was coconut products coming from plantations, with cocoa and rubber also being cultivated and exported as well. German Samoa was considered one of the most well-developed German colonies in the Pacific, allowing the colony to become nearly self-sufficient, with the Telefunken Railway connecting the capital's harbor to Mount Vaea and some roads. By 1914, the population was estimated to be just over 40,000, the large majority of those being Samoans, with German being the official language, but native Samoan was also widely spoken. The Germans co-operated with local chiefs, with the Germans respecting Samoan customs and culture, although they banned activities like gambling. For colonial defense, the islands had an extremely small force of  50 ceremonial guardsmen and an equally small volunteer force.

Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory

The final possession of the German colonial empire was a leased territory in eastern China, established following a military occupation of parts of the Shandong province around the port of Tsingtau (Qingdao), and the signing of a treaty with the Qing securing a 99-year lease for a naval coaling station and economic exploitation in 1898. By 1914, the leased territory was under the administration of Vice Admiral Alfred Meyer-Waldeck, with the capital being the port of Tsingtau. The main export goods of this territory were mostly agricultural products like soy and sesame, but beyond that, coal was also exported widely as well.

Being a vital port for the Germans in the region, the territory’s deep-water port was well built, with a smaller harbor for commercial shipping also being present, a shipyard and dry docks. As well as the Tsingtao-Jinan railway line, which linked the deep-water harbor to the interior of the Shandong province, and lastly, paved and wide streets that are often compared to those in German cities. By 1914, the population was around 200,000, the large majority being Chinese, whilst only a handful of Germans. Life and culture in this territory were characterized by the mixing of Bavarian-style buildings and Western-style services, with Chinese culture, customs and language, similar to the situation in Samoa, even serving as a safe haven for those trying to escape the Boxer Rebellion in 1911. In defense of the territory was the German Navy (Kaiserliche Marine) East Asia Squadron with a few ships and a small garrison force.

The End of Germany’s Empire

Now, to answer the question, what happened to them? And to summarize, when World War 1 began, each one of the German overseas territories and protectorates found themselves occupied by the Entente. Germany’s African colonies were conquered by the British and the French (with Belgian assistance), the Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory was besieged and occupied by the Japanese until the 20s when it was returned to China, Samoa surrendered quickly to New Zealand, Australia occupied German New Guinea, and the Pacific Islands went to Japan as a mandate. The signing of the Treaty of Versailles marked the official end of the German Empire.

With the benefit of hindsight, Germany's attempt at colonialism was poorly handled. Despite holding vast territories across the globe, colonies were managed to benefit a tiny minority of German settlers, while indigenous populations were treated as subordinate. Colonial rule relied on forced labor, was poorly managed, and colonies were not economically successful, providing low returns and often requiring significant state funding for infrastructure and military control.

Interested in European colonialism? Now read about France’s role in Algeria here.

Sources

1.     Michael Stuermer, 2013, THE GERMAN EMPIRE 1871 - 1919, book

2.     James Hawes, 2018, The Shortest History of Germany, book

3.     Helmut Walser Smith, 2020, Germany A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, book

George Eastman: The Man Who Put Photography in the Hands of the World

George Eastman (1854-1932) stands as one of the most consequential figures in the history of photography—not because he invented the medium, but because he changed who it belonged to. Through technical innovation, shrewd business strategy, and a stubborn belief in simplicity, he helped move photography from a demanding scientific craft into a shared social habit. In doing so, he reshaped how modern life is documented and remembered, building Kodak into one of the most influential companies of the industrial age.

Brian D’Ambrosio explains.

George Eastman.

Born on July 12, 1854, in Waterville, New York, Eastman grew up in modest circumstances. His father, George Washington Eastman, died in 1862, forcing him to leave school early and help support the family. He found steady work as a bank clerk in Rochester—a job that sharpened his methodical habits but offered little outlet for invention. Photography entered his life in the late 1870s, when he bought equipment for a planned vacation. What he encountered—glass plates, bulky cameras, portable darkrooms, and finicky chemistry—was so cumbersome that it pointed to a different problem. Photography’s greatest obstacle was not artistic skill. It was, perhaps, access.

By then, photography had already evolved through several distinct phases. Since the unveiling of the daguerreotype and calotype in 1839, the medium had advanced in fits and starts. The wet-plate collodion process of the 1850s produced sharper images but required photographers to coat, expose, and develop plates while still wet, often on location. It was exacting work—expensive, technical, and largely confined to professionals. Eastman, working at first with limited support, began to focus less on image quality than on ease of use—a quiet shift that would, indeed, alter the medium’s future.

Success

His first major success came in 1880 with a machine for coating dry photographic plates. Unlike wet plates, these could be prepared in advance, stored, and used when needed. In 1881, he incorporated the Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, laying the groundwork for what would become the Eastman Kodak Company.

The real breakthrough followed quickly. In 1884, Eastman introduced roll film, initially backed with paper, replacing fragile glass plates and making smaller, more practical cameras possible. Four years later, Kodak released its first camera, preloaded with enough film for 100 exposures and marketed with the now-famous slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” Customers mailed the camera back for developing, printing, and reloading. With that, nearly every technical barrier fell away.

The effect was immediate. Photography slipped its tripod and chemistry kit and went out into the world—portable, affordable, and within reach of people who had never considered using a camera. In 1889, Kodak introduced transparent flexible film, a development essential not only to still photography but to the emerging motion-picture industry. Early pioneers, including Thomas Edison and his collaborators, relied on such film stock, extending Eastman’s influence into cinema. Photography, once slow and deliberate, began to move—into narrative, into motion, and into mass circulation, perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of his work.

Under Eastman’s leadership, Kodak expanded aggressively in the early twentieth century. The introduction of the Brownie camera in 1900—priced at one dollar—helped fix photography as a mass activity, especially among families and children. Over time, Kodak refined film quality, camera design, and processing systems, dominating the global photographic market. Eastman remained closely involved, insisting on research, vertical integration, and—perhaps most importantly—consumer trust.

He was also ahead of his time in his treatment of workers. Eastman introduced employee benefits that were rare for the era, including pensions, disability coverage, and profit-sharing. A successful company, he believed, owed its workforce more than wages; it owed stability.

Philanthropy

His philanthropy became one of his most enduring legacies. Over his lifetime, he donated more than $100 million—much of it quietly. He was a major benefactor of the University of Rochester, helping elevate it into a leading research institution, and a crucial supporter of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose future he helped secure during uncertain years. He also funded dental clinics for children across the United States and Europe, reflecting a practical belief that preventive care could change lives.

In 1921, he established the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, which quickly became one of the world’s leading conservatories. His giving was direct and purposeful, aimed at education, science, and health rather than personal memorial. Eastman believed wealth carried an obligation: to widen opportunity. That belief was, indeed, borne out in the institutions he helped sustain.

In his later years, the old photography baron suffered from a painful degenerative spinal condition that restricted his mobility. In 1932, at seventy-seven, he took his own life, leaving behind a brief note: “My work is done. Why wait?” By then, his impact on photography—and on American industry—was secure.

Conclusion

George Eastman did not invent photography, but as a proverbial innate captain of industry he permanently altered its course. By simplifying its tools, reorganizing its economics, and placing it in the hands of ordinary people, he helped make photography a common language of modern life. Long after cameras changed shape and film gave way to pixels, his central idea endured: that memory should not belong to the few. It should, indeed, belong to everyone.

Brian D'Ambrosio is the author of Montana Eccentrics, New Mexico Eccentrics, and Italian-Americana: Explorers, Entertainers, and Eccentrics. Available here: Amazon US | Amazon UK

References

George Eastman Museum/Online Collections

PBS/American Experience/George Eastman

Miscellaneous obituaries: Daily Sentinel, March 15, 1932; Passaic Daily Herald, March 15, 1932.

The 1857 Dred Scott Decision

The Dred Scott decision (1857) was critically important in precipitating the Civil War because it invalidated the Missouri Compromise, declared African Americans were not U.S. citizens, and asserted Congress couldn't ban slavery in territories, infuriating the North, galvanizing the Republican Party, and intensifying the national debate, proving to many Northerners the South's "Slave Power" dominance and making compromise impossible. This ruling destroyed the delicate balance between free and slave states, pushing the nation further towards secession and war.

Lloyd W Klein explains.

Dred Scott.

Who Was Dred Scott?

Dred Scott was an escaped slave who sued for his freedom and that of his wife, Harriet, and their two daughters. Scott and his wife claimed their freedom because they had lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years as free blacks; in these states, slavery was illegal and the state laws said that slaveholders gave up their rights if they (escaped slaves) stayed for an extended period. When his owners brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom: first in Missouri state court, which ruled that he was still a slave under its law, and then in US federal court, which ruled against him, deciding that it must apply Missouri law. He ultimately appealed these rulings to the US Supreme Court. The legal case that forms the basis of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) is, in fact, a collection of lawsuits initiated in Missouri courts that ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The main plaintiff was Dred Scott, a previously enslaved individual who had been living as a freed man. The defendant was Irene Emerson and subsequently John F. A. Sandford (the widow of Scott’s owner and her brother). Scott filed a lawsuit for his freedom in the Missouri state court, asserting that he had been taken by his owner into free jurisdictions where slavery was prohibited. Scott had lived for extended periods in areas where slavery was prohibited by law: Illinois (1833–1836) was a free state under Illinois law and Wisconsin Territory (1836–1838) which was governed by the Northwest Ordinance and later the Missouri Compromise, both of which prohibited slavery. Scott contended that his residence in these free regions rendered him legally free, as Missouri had previously acknowledged the principle that residing in a free jurisdiction emancipated an enslaved person.

His full background was crucial to the case. He was born a slave around 1799. In 1818, Scott was taken by Peter Blow and his family to Alabama. In 1830, the family abandoned farming and relocated to St. Louis. Scott was sold to Dr. John Emerson, a surgeon in the U.S. Army. One unresolved controversy is whether Blow passed away before or after the sale was completed. Scott was dissatisfied with Dr. Emerson and attempted to escape, but was eventually recaptured. In 1833, Emerson moved to Illinois, a free state, and in 1837 to the Wisconsin Territory, which was also free. There, he met his wife, Harriet, who was also enslaved, and they married, a union that was not legally recognized among slaves; this fact became another point of contention. Harriet was subsequently sold to Emerson. They had two sons. In 1840, Emerson returned to Missouri, a slave state, and he died in 1842, with the Scotts being inherited by Emerson’s wife, Irene. In 1846, Scott offered Irene $300 to buy their freedom, but she declined; this is another noteworthy aspect, as it demonstrated he possessed his own funds from his labor. In 1846, Mr. Scott sued for his freedom, arguing that living in free states and territories for prolonged periods of time had made him and his wife free.

Scott first sued for freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court. Initially, Scott won his freedom at trial in 1847. On appeal, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the decision in 1852, ruling that residing in a free territory did not automatically emancipate him (Scott v. Emerson (15 Mo. 576). Scott remained enslaved under Missouri law. Meanwhile, Dred, Harriet and their family lived in Wisconsin. The question was raised whether or not the cases should be heard there, not Missouri, which made it unclear which, if either, state jurisdiction had standing in the case.

The cases then moved to Federal Court In 1853, Dred Scott sued John F. A. Sandford, who had inherited him, in federal court in St. Louis. The Blow family supported Scott’s case financially. Scott argued he was a U.S. citizen and thus could invoke diversity jurisdiction under Article III of the Constitution (allowing a citizen of one state to sue a citizen of another state in federal court). In lower federal courts, he continued to lose but remained living freely in Wisconsin. The federal courts initially split on jurisdiction. Scott appealed to the US Supreme Court in 1856, 10 years after his initial suit. He had been living on his own all of that time. 

The Dred Scott Decision

Legal scholars have traditionally considered the Dred Scott Decision the worst SCOTUS decision in history. Several reasons exist for its poor status in antebellum legal jurisprudence, including the merits of the legal case, its overreaching opinion beyond the case itself (obiter dicta), its inhibition of further legislative compromise on the slavery issue, and its direct influence in precipitating the Civil War. A full comprehension of the legal issues it raised and the catastrophe of its dreadful racial pronouncements are necessary to appreciate its appalling and shocking conclusions. In this regard, it may actually be far worse than the infamous Cornerstone Speech because it supposedly reflected the rule of law.

On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B Taney read his opinion, speaking for the majority. The United States Supreme Court decided 7–2 against Scott, finding that neither he nor any other person of African ancestry could claim citizenship in the United States, and therefore Scott could not legally bring suit in federal court. On behalf of the majority, Taney ruled that because Scott was considered the private property of his owners, he was subject to the Fifth Amendment, prohibiting the taking of property from its owner "without due process". Hence, Scott's “temporary residence” outside Missouri did not bring about his emancipation, as it would "improperly deprive Scott's owner of his legal property".

This ruling appeared to be in conflict with the provisions of the Missouri Compromise, passed in 1820 that admitted Missouri as a slave state, in exchange for legislation which prohibited slavery north of the 36°30′ parallel except for Missouri. Taney noted that the Compromise's legal provisions was intended to free slaves who were living north of this borderline in the western territories. Taney decided that this requirement constituted the government depriving slaveowners of their property. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise, which had kept the peace for 37 years, was determined to be unconstitutional, even though this finding was unnecessary to the decision in the case. It was also actually moot, because the provisions of the Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north were effectively repealed in the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.

The decisive elements of the verdict were the determination that slaves were legally designated as property, and that black people could never be US citizens, even if freed as recognized by state laws. Taney’s ruling meant that a man could be recognized as a citizen of a state but not a citizen of the country. But Taney continued: he ruled that slavery could not legally be excluded from U.S. territories or states because it is recognized in the Constitution. 

Minority Opinions

Justice McLean argued that by ruling that Scott was not a citizen, the Court had also ruled that it did not have jurisdiction to hear his case. Consequently, McLean contended that the Court should have simply dismissed the case without further judgment. He attacked much of the Court's decision as obiter dicta (literally: by the way) and thus an opinion that is not legally binding.

Justice Curtis objected to the accuracy of the majority’s historical data, noting that Black men were allowed to vote in five of the thirteen states of the Union at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. He viewed the right to vote as evidence that Black men were already citizens of both their states and of the United States. To argue that Scott was not an American citizen, Curtis wrote, was “more a matter of taste than of law.” 

Taney directly ruled that state citizenship did not accord African-Americans the rights of national citizenship. This seemed to directly contradict Article IV, section 2: "The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States." 

Free Blacks were given full citizenship and voted in some states - but not allowed on juries.  There was no precedent to be a state citizen and not a US citizen. Such a conclusion leads to highly questionable justice. A Black person could, in theory, sue in their own state (for example, Pennsylvania) if an illegal seizure occurred within that state’s borders. Once the person was taken across state lines, state courts lost jurisdiction, and it became a federal case. But that raised a problem if the plaintiff was a black person who wasn’t a citizen of the country.  No one had any idea what to make of this but it appeared as if the free black person had no recourse, and hence there was no remedy for kidnapping across state lines.

Dred Scott and his family lost the case but remained free. The Scott’s were purchased by the owner’s sons, who sold them to Taylor Blow, who manumitted them in May 1857.  A year later, Scott died of tuberculosis. Harriet lived for another 19 years as a free woman in St Louis, dying in 1876. Many people, both then and now, believe that both Scott, who could have just escaped, and the owner, Sandman, saw this as a test case and there was never really any plan to re-enslave them.

Binding Rulings (Ratio Decidendi) versus Obiter Dicta (Not Necessary to the Decision)

The only binding legal ruling in Dred Scott was that Black people are not citizens of the United States, which meant that Blacks, whether free or enslaved, had no standing to sue in federal court. This conclusion was necessary to decide the case — the Supreme Court dismissed Scott’s federal lawsuit on this basis. Dred Scott had no right to sue in federal court because he was not a citizen. Scott could not invoke diversity jurisdiction under Article III of the Constitution.

A central legal principle is that a ruling should be based on legal principles and not give opinions about extraneous questions. Taney went out of his way to give opinions that had nothing to do with Mr. Scott’s suit. These statements were not required to resolve Scott’s claim but became infamous for their political and legal implications:

1.     Congress cannot prohibit slavery in federal territories.

2.     The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional, because Congress had no authority to ban slavery in the territories. Reason: Slaveholders’ property rights are protected by the Fifth Amendment.

3.     Slaves are property under the Constitution.

4.     The Constitution protects slave owners’ property rights across state lines.

5.     Assertions that Blacks were “beings of an inferior order… so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Despite its immense controversy and broad rejection throughout the North, the Dred Scott decision stood as the prevailing law of the land. Those portions of the decision that were central to the decision, like any SCOTUS ruling, are binding law. The question raised was, were the obiter dicta opinions enforceable? Several states passed laws contradicting the ruling, a form of nullification. Central to the ruling was the Court’s declaration that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery in federal territories. This point, which was not strictly necessary to resolve Dred Scott’s specific case (and thus, technically, "obiter dictum"), had immense political consequences. Although such commentary was not legally binding, Taney and his allies intended it as an authoritative reading of the Constitution. Southern leaders and Democrats quickly treated this territorial claim as settled constitutional doctrine, insisting that slavery was lawful in all federal territories.

Taney’s Flawed Legal Reasoning

The Constitution does not explicitly exclude free Black individuals from citizenship. In fact, at the time of its drafting, several states recognized free Blacks as citizens, granting them rights such as voting and property ownership. Moreover, Black individuals contributed to the nation’s founding; for instance, Crispus Attucks, a Black man, was a casualty of the Boston Massacre, and many others served in the Continental Army. These historical realities directly undermine Chief Justice Taney’s claim that the framers unanimously viewed Black people as outside the political community.

Likewise, Taney’s assertion that Congress lacked authority to restrict slavery in federal territories disregarded both historical precedent and established law. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787—subsequently reaffirmed by the First Congress—prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 similarly regulated the expansion of slavery and had long been accepted as a valid exercise of congressional power.

Taney’s opinion, therefore, was not compelled by the Constitution—it was a partisan, pro-slavery interpretation that projected into the document values which were never explicitly present. The dissenting justices underscored this point, arguing that both citizenship and the regulation of territories were matters traditionally left to congressional and state authority. Many scholars consequently regard Dred Scott as a paradigmatic instance of judicial activism—a case in which the Court inserted itself into a contentious political debate, expanding the reach of slavery instead of addressing only the case at hand. Thus, while Taney’s decision may have reflected the prevailing political influence of slaveholders, it was neither required by law nor morally defensible, even within the context of the antebellum Constitution.

Legal Consequence for Black Americans

The excerpts presented in table 2 demonstrate the harsh language employed by Taney and the majority. Upon examining these statements, the ramifications of Taney’s decision are appalling. This ruling signified that Black individuals were denied acknowledgment as citizens of the United States and would indefinitely remain in that condition. Dred Scott, along with all subsequent Black plaintiffs, was prohibited from filing lawsuits in federal court, nor could they pursue legal actions if the issue crossed state lines, leaving them completely powerless due to their race and status as former slaves. Additionally, slaves are categorized as property protected under the Fifth Amendment, meaning they cannot be taken from their owners without permission. The Constitution was interpreted as institutionalizing the denial of rights based on skin color, a circumstance that cannot be undone. The ruling expressed that the natural or inherent rights of individuals to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were never intended to apply to Black individuals. As a result, Black people are not considered fully human and lack legal equality with white individuals. Simply living in free territory or being independent for a prolonged period would not provide sufficient grounds for their emancipation.

The legal consequences were disastrous. Blacks would have no rights that whites are required to honor. This ruling denies Blacks, whether free or enslaved, the ability to stand in federal court. If no Black individual can ever file a federal lawsuit, they are left utterly powerless. Black individuals would be susceptible to federal crimes committed against them, as they cannot seek justice in a federal court.

The Fifth Amendment

Taney's majority opinion highlighted that enslaved individuals were regarded as property, which meant that the federal government could not intervene in a slave owner's right to transport their property into any territory. The 5th Amendment states that no individual can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor can private property be taken for public use without just compensation. Taney’s opinion was based on the 5th Amendment's protection of property, explicitly referencing the Due Process Clause. This legal reasoning necessitated two conditions: 1) that slaves possessed none of the natural rights of men, and 2) that the US Constitution legally classified them as property.

Taney contended that enslaved individuals were legally recognized as property under both state and federal law (as safeguarded by the Constitution’s acknowledgment of slavery in provisions such as the Fugitive Slave Clause and the Three-Fifths Clause). Consequently, if Congress enacted a law—such as the Missouri Compromise—that prohibited slavery in federal territories, it would be unconstitutional as it deprived slaveholders of their property (enslaved individuals) without due process of law. He stated: “An act of Congress which deprives a citizen of his property merely because he brought his property into a particular Territory of the United States … could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law.”

Taney reasoned that enslaved individuals were a type of property recognized by law. Slaveholders were “citizens” entitled to protections under the Fifth Amendment. Thus, any federal law prohibiting slavery in a territory infringed upon property rights without due process. If slaves were considered persons, they could not be deprived of their liberty without due process of law. However, if slaves were deemed “property,” then masters could not be deprived of their property without due process. From the viewpoint of 1789, the only reasonable interpretation of the 5th Amendment was to conclude that slaves were legally not persons.

There was legal precedent for this interpretation.  Justice Story said (in the majority opinion of Prigg vs Pennsylvania 1842), ”We have said that the clause (article 4 section 2) contains a positive and unqualified recognition of the right of the owner in the slave, unaffected by any state law or legislation whatsoever, because there is no qualification or restriction of it to be found therein, and we have no right to insert any which is not expressed and cannot be fairly implied … The owner must, therefore, have the right to seize and repossess the slave., which the local laws of his own state confer upon him as property ….”

The Tenth Amendment

The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution had implications for slavery that were profound but are often misunderstood. It provides that powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. Before 1857, this language reinforced a widely accepted constitutional arrangement: slavery was regulated by state law. Because the Constitution granted Congress no general authority over slavery within existing states, regulation of the institution inside state borders was understood to belong to each state. Massachusetts could abolish slavery; South Carolina could entrench and expand it. Congress, as a rule, did not interfere with slavery where it already existed under state authority.

But the Tenth Amendment did not protect slavery everywhere. It reserved undelegated powers to the states; it did not retract powers that were expressly delegated to Congress. Among those enumerated powers was authority over federal territories under Article IV, Section 3—the Territorial Clause. Under that authority Congress had governed slavery’s status outside the states, most notably through the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, and later through the Missouri Compromise. Congress also exercised its commerce power to end the international slave trade in 1808. None of these measures were thought, prior to 1857, to violate the Tenth Amendment, because they operated in areas where federal authority was textually grounded.

Pro-slavery constitutional theorists frequently blurred this distinction. They argued that because slavery was a “state right,” it carried a kind of constitutional immunity wherever Americans went. That reading converted a rule about reserved powers into a claim of national protection for slavery, something the Constitution nowhere explicitly declared. Properly understood, the Tenth Amendment meant that slavery inside a state depended on that state’s law. It did not mean that Congress was powerless in the territories, nor that slavery enjoyed automatic constitutional shelter beyond state borders. The constitutional struggle before the Civil War centered precisely on where state authority ended and federal authority began. Slavery stood at that fault line.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott transformed that equilibrium. Taney held that enslaved persons were property protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and that Congress therefore lacked authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. In practical effect, this reasoning nationalized slavery. What had previously been treated as a matter of state law within states and federal discretion in territories became, under Taney’s logic, a constitutionally protected property right that Congress could not exclude from federal soil. The earlier balance: state control locally, congressional control territorially, was overturned. The Tenth Amendment’s reservation of powers to the states remained textually intact, but its practical significance for containing slavery was gutted.

The Political Rise of Abraham Lincoln

It was at this moment that Abraham Lincoln made his decisive political move. Before Dred Scott, most Americans accepted that states controlled slavery within their borders while Congress governed it in the territories. The Court’s decision shattered that arrangement by declaring that neither Congress nor territorial voters could bar slavery’s expansion. Lincoln grasped immediately that this logic placed slavery on a trajectory toward nationalization. In his “House Divided” speech, he warned that the country could not endure permanently half slave and half free because the constitutional barriers to slavery’s spread were being dismantled.

Lincoln’s brilliance lay not merely in opposing slavery but in explaining how the Court’s reasoning reordered the Constitution itself. By locating slavery’s protection in the Fifth Amendment and denying Congress authority in the territories, the Court rendered the earlier federal-state balance effectively meaningless. Lincoln translated that constitutional disruption into a moral and democratic argument ordinary voters could understand: self-government was being made powerless. If majorities in the territories could not decide the status of slavery, then “popular sovereignty” was a façade. By exposing that contradiction, Lincoln built a coalition that understood the crisis not simply as a sectional dispute but as a threat to constitutional democracy. His capacity to connect technical constitutional reasoning with a compelling public narrative is central to his enduring stature in American political history.

Conclusion

The consequences of Dred Scott were devastating. By denying Black Americans citizenship, the Court stripped them of access to federal courts, leaving free Blacks defenseless against kidnapping across state lines. By constitutionalizing slave property, it placed slavery beyond democratic control. If Congress could not regulate slavery in the territories, then neither could settlers. The institution was no longer local—it was being made national.

In trying to settle the slavery question, the Court destroyed the constitutional middle ground. The nation was now forced to choose: slavery would either expand everywhere or be stopped by political resistance. Abraham Lincoln saw the crisis and articulated its impact before anyone else: a political opening he grasped.

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The Case That Made the Supreme Court Supreme: Martin v Hunter’s Lessee

In 1816, a quiet property dispute in Virginia produced one of the most powerful rulings in American constitutional history. Two centuries later, the decision in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee still determines who gets the last word on the Constitution.

Randall Griffin explains.

Justice Joseph Story. Painting by George Peter Alexander Healy.

Who Owns the Northern Neck?

From the late 1680s to the 1700s, the British Crown granted vast tracts of land in Virginia to the Fairfax family.

During the Revolution, Virginia passed a law that allowed for the confiscation of Loyalists’ property. When Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron - despite staying neutral during the Revolutionary War to protect his land - died in December 1781 without an heir in Virginia, the state moved to seize his property.

Part of his property was called the Northern Neck, a massive tract of roughly 300,000-acres along of the northernmost of Virginia’s three peninsulas on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

But international agreements complicated things. The Treaty of Paris (1783, which ended the Revolutionary War) and Jay’s Treaty (1795) both protected the property interests of British subjects living in America, essentially nullifying the Virginia confiscation.

The nephew and heir of Lord Fairfax, Denny Martin Fairfax, a British subject who had never lived in Virginia, hired attorneys James and John Marshall and, in the case of Hite v. Fairfax (1786), won recognition as Lord Fairfax’s legal heir.

A year later, the Virginia legislature voided the Fairfax land grant and confiscated the property, granting a portion (739 acres) to David Hunter.

Martin, who had sold his land interest to John and James Marshall, challenged the confiscation. He initially won his court case (Fairfax’s Devisee v. Hunter’s Lessee), but lost on appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court, which upheld the confiscation by ruling that the federal treaties did not cover the dispute in question.

In 1810, the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld Hunter’s claim to the land.

The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which, in 1813, reversed the Virginia Court of Appeals’ decision. Finding that the Treaty of Paris and Jay’s Treat applied in the dispute, the Court remanded (sent back) the case back to the Virginia court to litigate.

But the Virginia Court, instead of reconsidering the case, set the stage for one of the most important legal battles in American history.

The Legal Battle Begins

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the US Supreme Court did not have authority over cases beginning in state courts, arguing that Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 (which established the federal judiciary) was unconstitutional. The Virginia court ruled that both state and federal courts were of equal standing and the supreme decider of the law in their own governments, neither having superiority over the other.

What began as a land dispute had become something much bigger: is Section 25 of the Judiciary Act, which grants the US Supreme Court appellate review over state court cases involving federal law, unconstitutional?

The Virginia courts had said yes, but the Supreme Court said no. Justice Story, writing in a unanimous decision, ruled that federal treaties superseded state laws under Article VI of US Constitution (the Supremacy Clause) and, along with the appellate jurisdiction in Article III, gave federal courts the power to review state decisions involving federal law or the Constitution.

Justice Story rejected the claim that the state and federal courts were co-equal interpreters of the Constitution.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court stated the importance of having a single, coherent interpretation of the Constitution and federal laws rather than each individual state interpreting its own versions.

Justice Story specifically called out Article III, which states that the Supreme Court may review state court decisions.

Article III, Section I: The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

Article III, Section II: The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority… to controversies between two or more states; between a state and citizens of another state; between citizens of different states; between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens, or subjects.

Justice Story ruled Congress had specifically granted the Supreme Court the power under Section 25 of the Judiciary Act to review state court decisions when federal issues were involved.

Critics of Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee argued that the decision gave too much authority to the federal judiciary. Virginia judges flatly rejected the Court’s authority, declaring that “the appellate power of the Supreme Court of the United States does not extend to this court.” At the same time, long-standing fears about judicial power resurfaced. As the Anti-Federalist writer ‘Brutus’ had warned decades earlier, the Supreme Court could become “exalted above all other power in the government.” Yet Justice Story defended the ruling as essential to national unity, cautioning that without federal review, “the Constitution… would be different in different states.”

The Supreme Court further upheld its authority in the 1821 case of Cohens v. Virginia, which addressed whether the Supreme Court had the power to hear appeals concerning state criminal cases.

Why Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee Still Matters Today

Two centuries after Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, the Supreme Court still acts as the nation’s final referee, stepping in when state courts and federal law collide. Many court cases we’re familiar with today come from this 1816 ruling.

Miranda v. Arizona (1966)

Anyone who has watched a police procedural can probably recite the Miranda rights. The reading of a citizen’s rights during arrest grew from a landmark case involving Ernesto Miranda, whose confession was used against him in an court.

In 1966, Arizona police arrested Miranda for kidnapping and rape. After hours of police questioning, he confessed and signed a written statement. Miranda was not advised of his Constitutional rights, especially that he had the right to remain silent or the right to counsel.

The Arizona courts upheld the conviction. The Supreme Court reviewed the case, and in a 5-4 decision ruled that Miranda’s  Fifth Amendment rights had been violated, creating the famous ‘Miranda warning.’

Bush v. Gore (2000)

Most of us remember the disputed 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

The case centered on the vote in Florida, where the margins were tiny – only a few hundred votes out of almost six million. Because the margin was so slim, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual machine recount, where disputes arose on whether the manual recounts would continue if several counties’ ballots were unclear (inventing the phrase ‘hanging chads’).

The situation dragged on until December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, overruled the Florida Supreme Court and ordered the manual recount stopped. The Court cited that the way the recounts were being conducted in the various counties with no consistent statewide standard violated the Equal Protection Clause. The Court also said that there was not enough time to establish a new recount system before the deadline for selecting presidential electors.

Using the authority it gained from Martin v Hunter’s Lessee, the Supreme Court overturned the Florida supreme court ruling. Bush won Florida by 537 votes, and the state’s electoral votes made him President.

Obegefell v Hodges (2015)

Obergefell v. Hodges is considered the landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

Several same-sex couples across the country had challenged state laws banning same-sex marriages or the refusal to recognize marriages performed in other states. One plaintiff, Jim Obergefell, sued the state of Ohio after it refused to list him as the surviving spouse on his husband’s death certificate.

In another 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court overruled the various state’s laws. In finding that marriage is a fundamental liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court ruled states must allow same-sex marriage and recognize those marriages performed in other states.

Each of these cases shows the same fundamental rule established in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, in that state courts may decide cases involving federal law, but the Supreme Court has the ultimate authority to review and correct them if necessary.

What began as a quarrel over confiscated farmland in Virginia two centuries ago ultimately answered a question that still shapes American law today: when state courts and federal law collide, who has the last word?

Later cases since have strengthened Court’s authority, but Martin v Hunter’s Lessee laid the foundation for the Supreme Court to be the last guardian of constitutional rights. By reviewing state court decisions when necessary, the Supreme Court ensured that for generations the civil rights granted under the Constitution would be enforced uniformly nationwide.

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