Petersburg lies at the head of navigation on the Appomattox River, twenty-three miles south of the Confederate capital at Richmond. Its role as a port contributed to its growth in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth centuries. Railroads arrived in Petersburg in the 1830s, and by 1860 five lines converged in the city, making it one of the South’s leading transportation hubs. Petersburg also developed a vibrant manufacturing economy, with twenty tobacco factories, four cotton mills, and a number of iron foundries and flour mills.
Petersburg’s 18,266 residents in 1860 were divided almost equally between blacks and whites. No Southern city on the eve of the Civil War (Petersburg would be the seventh-largest municipality in the Confederacy) boasted a higher percentage of African Americans among its free population. Voters in Petersburg cast their ballots for the Constitutional Union candidate in the 1860 presidential election, John Bell of Tennessee, and sent a conditional Un
Gorgas, Josiah (1818-1883) – Encyclopedia Virginia encyclopediavirginia.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from encyclopediavirginia.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A special election in January 1861 allowed Virginia voters the opportunity to pick delegates to the convention. To the dismay of secessionists in Virginia and across the South, of the 152 delegates they elected, a solid majority were Unionist. Desire to leave the Union had never been as strong in the Upper South, and some Unionists speculated that Virginia’s example might even draw the wayward Deep South back into the United States.
When the convention met on February 13 in the Mechanics Institute at the foot of Capitol Square in Richmond, all of the factions favored delay. Radical secession men, small in number, were content to let the Confederates organize their infant republic in Montgomery, Alabama, before acting. Adamant Unionists, also a minority, bided their time as well. The great majority of delegates were conservatives who loved the Union, mistrusted Lincoln, but accepted his election and inauguration. They hoped that, like their predecessors in constitutional disputes o
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American Militarism is Liable to Destroy Itself
At the Capitol and elsewhere, the US government helps make the violence it reaps.
Robert E. Lee, you may recall from your US history class, graduated second in his class from West Point, and later superintended it. Even so, he called it a snake pit. The US Army, that is, trained a man whose tactics later drove it to distraction and who came close to occupying its Capitol. Other graduates of the United States Military Academy who proved useful in the attempt to preserve racial supremacy and chattel slavery some of them trained in turn by Lee included Jubal Early, Braxton Bragg, Pierre G.T. Beauregard, Richard Ewell, James Longstreet, and Stonewall Jackson.