In “An Englishman’s Visit to Capt. R. E. Lee,” published in the June 1915 issue of the Confederate Veteran, Gerald Smythe, a Confederate enthusiast, recounts time he spent with Robert E. Lee Jr. in 1909.
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Category: Civil War
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“Battle of Antietam” by Alexander Hunter (1903)
In 1903, Alexander Hunter, a former Confederate soldier from Virginia, published this reminiscence of the Battle of Antietam in the Southern Historical Society Papers.
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“Civil War veteran of Portsmouth, Virginia” (1937)
Albert Jones, a former slave, tells interviewer Thelma Dunston of the Virginia Writers Project in 1937 about his liife and about running away to join the Union Army during the Civil War.
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“Death of Gilbert Hunt,” Richmond Daily Dispatch (April 27, 1863)
In the “Death of Gilbert Hunt,” published on April 27, 1863, the Richmond Daily Dispatch reports on the death, the day before, of the African American blacksmith Gilbert Hunt.
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“From the South: Horrible Crime of Negro Soldiers,” New York Evening Express (August 9, 1864)
In this article, dated August 9, 1864, the New York Evening Express reprinted an account of Draper’s raid and reported atrocities from the Richmond Enquirer. It is likely the Express, which had Confederate sympathies, exaggerated what had happened.
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“Gabriel’s Defeat” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (September 1862)
In “Gabriel’s Defeat,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in September 1862, the abolitionist minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson relates a history of Gabriel’s Conspiracy (1800) drawn mostly from newspaper accounts. Writing in the midst of the American Civil War (1861–1865), he places the planned insurrection in the context of Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (1859).
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“General Lee’s Views on Enlisting the Negroes,” Century Magazine (August 1888)
In “General Lee’s Views on Enlisting the Negroes,” published in its August 1888 issue, Century Magazine reproduces an exchange of letters in January 1865 between Andrew Hunter, a member of the Senate of Virginia, and Robert E. Lee, then commanding the Army of Northern Virginia, on the debate over whether to enlist African Americans as Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
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“Interview of Mr. Charles Grandy” (1937)
Interviewer David Hoggard of the Virginia Writers Project recounts in 1937 the life of Charles Grandy. Grandy was born into slavery and ran away to serve in the Union Army in the Civil War.
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“Interview of Mrs. Candis Goodwin”
Candis Goodwin, a former slave, tells an interviewer from the Virginia Writers Project in 1937 about her childhood and her memories of the Civil War.
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“Miscegenation” by Basil L. Gildersleeve (April 18, 1864)
In this essay, published in the Richmond Examiner on April 18, 1864, Basil L. Gildersleeve warns against the dangers of race-mixing. Gildersleeve was a professor of Greek and Hebrew at the University of Virginia from 1856 until 1873, and penned sixty-three editorials for the Richmond paper between October 1863 and August 1864.
