American Civil War
The American Civil War was a war fought in the United States from 1861 to 1865, between the North and the South. The Civil War is the most studied and written about episode in U. S. history. As a result of the long-standing controversy over the enslavement of black people, war broke out in April 1861 when secessionist forces attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina shortly after Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated as the President of the United States; the loyalists of the Union in the North proclaimed support for the Constitution. They faced secessionists of the Confederate States in the South, who advocated for states' rights to uphold slavery. Among the 34 U. S. states in February 1861, secessionist partisans in seven Southern slave states declared state secessions from the country and unveiled their defiant formation of a Confederate States of America in rebellion against the U. S. Constitutional government; the Confederacy grew to control over half the territory in eleven states, it claimed the additional states of Kentucky and Missouri by assertions from exiled native secessionists without territory or population.
These were given full representation in the Confederate Congress throughout the Civil War. The two remaining slave holding states of Delaware and Maryland were invited to join the Confederacy, but nothing substantial developed; the Confederate States was never diplomatically recognized by the government of the United States or by that of any foreign country. The states that remained loyal to the U. S. were known as the Union. The Union and the Confederacy raised volunteer and conscription armies that fought in the South over the course of four years. Intense combat left 620,000 to 750,000 people dead, more than the number of U. S. military deaths in all other wars combined. The war ended when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Appomattox Court House. Confederate generals throughout the southern states followed suit. Much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed the transportation systems; the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, four million black slaves were freed.
During the Reconstruction Era that followed the war, national unity was restored, the national government expanded its power, civil rights were granted to freed black slaves through amendments to the Constitution and federal legislation. In the 1860 presidential election, led by Abraham Lincoln, supported banning slavery in all the U. S. territories. The Southern states viewed this as a violation of their constitutional rights and as the first step in a grander Republican plan to abolish slavery; the three pro-Union candidates together received an overwhelming 82% majority of the votes cast nationally: Republican Lincoln's votes centered in the north, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas' votes were distributed nationally and Constitutional Unionist John Bell's votes centered in Tennessee and Virginia; the Republican Party, dominant in the North, secured a plurality of the popular votes and a majority of the electoral votes nationally. He was the first Republican Party candidate to win the presidency.
However, before his inauguration, seven slave states with cotton-based economies declared secession and formed the Confederacy. The first six to declare secession had the highest proportions of slaves in their populations, with an average of 49 percent. Of those states whose legislatures resolved for secession, the first seven voted with split majorities for unionist candidates Douglas and Bell, or with sizable minorities for those unionists. Of these, only Texas held a referendum on secession. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession. Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln's March 4, 1861, inaugural address declared that his administration would not initiate a civil war. Speaking directly to the "Southern States", he attempted to calm their fears of any threats to slavery, reaffirming, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the United States where it exists.
I believe I have no lawful right to do so, I have no inclination to do so." After Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy, efforts at compromise failed and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates assumed that European countries were so dependent on "King Cotton" that they would intervene, but none did, none recognized the new Confederate States of America. Hostilities began on April 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter. While in the Western Theater the Union made significant permanent gains, in the Eastern Theater, the battle was inconclusive during 1861–1862. In September 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal. To the west, by summer 1862 the Union destroyed the Confederate river navy much of its western armies, seized New Orleans; the successful 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863, Robert E. Lee's Confederate incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Western successes led to Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. Inflicting an ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports, the Union marshaled the resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions, leading to the fall of Atlanta to William T. Sherman and his march to th
Jonathan Cilley
Jonathan Cilley was a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Maine, he served part of one term in the 25th Congress, died as the result of a wound sustained in a duel with another Congressman, William J. Graves of Kentucky. Cilley was a native of Nottingham, New Hampshire, was educated at Atkinson Academy and Bowdoin College, he settled in Thomaston, where he studied law and attained admission to the bar in addition to editing the Thomaston Register newspaper. A Democrat, Cilley served in the Maine House of Representatives from 1831 to 1836, was Speaker in 1835 and 1836. In 1836, Cilley was elected to the United States House of Representatives, he served part of one term, died as the result of a gunshot wound caused when he engaged in a duel with Representative William J. Graves, they fired at each other with rifles three times, on the third shot, Graves hit Cilley's femoral artery, causing blood loss which resulted in Cilley's death. He was temporarily interred at Congressional Cemetery, reinterred at Elm Grove Cemetery in Thomaston.
Jonathan Cilley was born in Nottingham, New Hampshire, was the son of Jane Cilley and Greenleaf Cilley. He was the brother of Joseph Cilley, grandson of Major General Joseph Cilley, nephew of Bradbury Cilley. Cilley attended Bowdoin College, he was a member of Bowdoin's famed class of 1825, which included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. While at Bowdoin, Cilley became close friends with future U. S. President Franklin Pierce, a member of the class of 1824. Deciding to stay in Maine after graduating from Bowdoin, Cilley studied law with John Ruggles, was admitted to the bar in 1828, practiced in Thomaston. In 1829, Jonathan Cilley married the daughter of local businessman Hezekiah Prince. Jonathan and Deborah had five children, two of whom died young, their surviving children were Greenleaf, Jonathan Prince, Julia. Jonathan Prince Cilley became a Brigadier General by Brevet in the Union Army during the Civil War. Greenleaf was a career officer in the United States Navy, he married the daughter of a former Argentinian governor of the Falkland Islands, died there in 1898.
Julia was the wife of Ellis Draper Lazell. Cilley edited the Thomaston Register from 1829–1831 and represented Thomaston in the Maine House of Representatives from 1831–1836, serving as Speaker in his final two years, he was elected to the United States Congress, but did not complete his first term. Cilley died in office after sustaining a fatal wound in a duel with Congressman William J. Graves of Kentucky; the climate surrounding the Twenty-fifth U. S. Congress was one of increasing political partisanship. Majority Democrats fought with minority Whigs over the response to the Panic of 1837, blamed on the policies of Democratic President Martin Van Buren. Underlying this conflict was lingering bitterness over the decision of Van Buren's predecessor, Democrat Andrew Jackson, not to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States. One of the pillars of the Whig press was the New York Courier and Enquirer, a newspaper edited by James Watson Webb. Democrats, including Jonathan Cilley, considered Webb's coverage of Congress to be biased and unfair.
Webb, who considered himself insulted by Cilley's suggestion of quid pro quo corruption, persuaded a Whig friend, Congressman William J. Graves, to deliver Webb's challenge to a duel. Cilley refused to accept the letter, in terms which Graves decided were an insult to his honor. Dueling was prohibited within the boundaries of the District of Columbia, so the participants and their seconds – George Wallace Jones for Cilley and Henry A. Wise for Graves – arranged to meet on February 24, 1838, at the Bladensburg Dueling Grounds, just outside the city limits and inside the Maryland border; as the challenged party, Cilley had the choice of weapons. Because of Graves' reputation as an expert pistol shot, Cilley selected rifles, with the distance between the duelists to be 80 yards, a distance far enough apart to negate Graves' supposed shooting skill. After their first fire missed, the participants shortened the distance and fired again, but again both shots missed. On the third exchange of shots, Graves fatally wounded Cilley by shooting him through the femoral artery.
Cilley bled to death on the dueling ground within a matter of minutes. He was buried at Congressional Cemetery, re-interred at Elm Grove Cemetery in Thomaston, Maine. There is a cenotaph to Cilley's memory located at Congressional Cemetery. After Cilley's death, longtime friend Nathaniel Hawthorne published two biographical sketches of him, his colleagues paid tribute to him by passing a federal law on February 20, 1839, which strengthened the strict prohibition against dueling in Washington, D. C. by making it a crime to issue or accept a challenge within district limits if the actual duel was to take place outside the district. List of United States Congress members who died in office List of United States Congress members killed or wounded in office Franscell, Ron. Crime Buff's Guide to Outlaw Washington, DC. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press. ISBN 978-0-7627-7385-5. Ginn, Roger. New England Must Not Be Trampled On: The Tragic Death of Jonathan Cilley. Lanham, MD: Down East Books. ISBN 978-1-60893-388-4.
Hastings, Hugh J..
National Register of Historic Places listings in Belknap County, New Hampshire
This is a list of the National Register of Historic Places listings in Belknap County, New Hampshire. This is intended to be a complete list of the properties and districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Belknap County, New Hampshire, United States. Latitude and longitude coordinates are provided for many National Register districts. There are 45 properties and districts listed on the National Register in the county; this National Park Service list is complete through NPS recent listings posted April 12, 2019. List of National Historic Landmarks in New Hampshire National Register of Historic Places listings in New Hampshire Starbuck, David; the Archeology of New Hampshire. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press. ISBN 9781584655626
National Register of Historic Places listings in Coös County, New Hampshire
This is a list of the National Register of Historic Places listings in Coos County, New Hampshire. This is intended to be a complete list of the properties and districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Coos County, New Hampshire, United States. Latitude and longitude coordinates are provided for many National Register districts. There are 30 properties and districts listed on the National Register in the county, including 1 National Historic Landmark; this National Park Service list is complete through NPS recent listings posted April 12, 2019. List of National Historic Landmarks in New Hampshire National Register of Historic Places listings in New Hampshire
Education in the United States
Education in the United States is provided in public and home schools. State governments set overall educational standards mandate standardized tests for K–12 public school systems and supervise through a board of regents, state colleges, universities. Funding comes from the state and federal government. Private schools are free to determine their own curriculum and staffing policies, with voluntary accreditation available through independent regional accreditation authorities, although some state regulation can apply. In 2013, about 87% of school-age children attended state funded public schools, about 10% attended tuition- and foundation-funded private schools, 3% were home-schooled. By state law, education is compulsory over an age range starting between five and eight and ending somewhere between ages sixteen and eighteen, depending on the state; this requirement can be satisfied in public schools, state-certified private schools, or an approved home school program. In most schools, compulsory education is divided into three levels: elementary school, middle or junior high school, high school.
Children are divided by age groups into grades, ranging from kindergarten and first grade for the youngest children, up to twelfth grade as the final year of high school. There are a large number and wide variety of publicly and administered institutions of higher education throughout the country. Post-secondary education, divided into college, as the first tertiary degree, graduate school, is described in a separate section below. Higher education includes elite private colleges like Harvard University, Stanford University, MIT, Caltech, large state flagship universities, private liberal arts schools, historically-black colleges and universities, community colleges, for-profit colleges like University of Phoenix. College enrollment rates in the United States have increased over the long term. At the same time, student loan debt has risen to $1.5 trillion. The United States spends more per student on education than any other country. In 2014, the Pearson/Economist Intelligence Unit rated US education as 14th best in the world.
In 2015, the Programme for International Student Assessment rated U. S. high school students No. 40 globally in No. 24 in Science and Reading. The President of the National Center on Education and the Economy said of the results "the United States cannot long operate a world-class economy if our workers are, as the OECD statistics show, among the worst-educated in the world". Former U. S. Education Secretary John B. King, Jr. acknowledged the results in conceding U. S. students were well behind their peers. According to a report published by the U. S. News & World Report, of the top ten colleges and universities in the world, eight are American; the US ranks 3rd from the bottom among OECD nations in terms of its' poverty gap, 4th from the bottom in terms of poverty rate. Jonathan Kozol has described these inequalities in K–12 education in Savage Inequalities and The Shame of a Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Colonial New England encouraged its towns to support free public schools funded by taxation.
In the early 19th century Massachusetts took the lead in education reform and public education with programs designed by Horace Mann that were emulated across the North. Teachers were specially trained in normal schools and taught the three Rs and history and geography. Public education was at the elementary level in most places. After the Civil War, the cities began building high schools; the South was far behind northern standards on every educational measure and gave weak support to its segregated all-black schools. However northern philanthropy and northern churches provided assistance to private black colleges across the South. Religious denominations across the country set up their private colleges. States opened state universities, but they were quite small until well into the 20th century. In 1823, the Reverend Samuel Read Hall founded the first normal school, the Columbian School in Concord, aimed at improving the quality of the burgeoning common school system by producing more qualified teachers.
In the mid-20th century, the increasing Catholic population led to the formation of parochial schools in the largest cities. Theologically oriented Episcopalian and Jewish bodies on a smaller scale set up their own parochial schools. There were debates over whether tax money could be used to support them, with the answer being no. From about 1876, thirty-nine states passed a constitutional amendment to their state constitutions, called Blaine Amendments after James G. Blaine, one of their chief promoters, forbidding the use of public tax money to fund local parochial schools. States passed laws to make schooling compulsory between 1852 and 1917, they used federal funding designated by the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Acts of 1862 and 1890 to set up land grant colleges specializing in agriculture and engineering. By 1870, every state had free elementary schools, albeit only in urban centers. According to a 2018 study in the Economic Journal, states were more to adopt compulsory education laws during the Age of Mass Migration if they hosted more European immigrants with lower exposure to civic values.
Following Reconstruction the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute was founded in 1881 as a state college, in Tuskegee, Alabama, to train "Colored Teachers," led by Booker T. Washington, himself a freed slave, his movement spread, leading
National Register of Historic Places listings in Strafford County, New Hampshire
This is a list of the National Register of Historic Places listings in Strafford County, New Hampshire. This is intended to be a complete list of the properties and districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Strafford County, New Hampshire, United States. Latitude and longitude coordinates are provided for many National Register districts. There are 45 properties and districts listed on the National Register in the county, including one National Historic Landmark; this National Park Service list is complete through NPS recent listings posted April 12, 2019. List of National Historic Landmarks in New Hampshire National Register of Historic Places listings in New Hampshire
Union Army
During the American Civil War, the Union Army referred to the United States Army, the land force that fought to preserve the Union of the collective states. Known as the Federal Army, it proved essential to the preservation of the United States of America as a working, viable republic; the Union Army was made up of the permanent regular army of the United States, but further fortified and strengthened by the many temporary units of dedicated volunteers as well as including those who were drafted in to service as conscripts. To this end, the Union Army fought and triumphed over the efforts of the Confederate States Army in the American Civil War. Over the course of the war, 2,128,948 men enlisted in the Union Army, including 178,895 colored troops. Of these soldiers, 596,670 were wounded or went missing; the initial call-up was for just three months, after which many of these men chose to reenlist for an additional three years. When the American Civil War began in April 1861, there were only 16,367 men in the U.
S. Army, including 1,108 commissioned officers. 20% of these officers, most of them Southerners, choosing to tie their lives and fortunes to the Army of the Confederacy. In addition 200 West Point graduates who had left the Army, including Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Braxton Bragg, would return to service at the outbreak of the war; this group's loyalties were far more divided, with 92 donning Confederate gray and 102 putting on the blue of the Union Army. The U. S. Army consisted of ten regiments of infantry, four of artillery, two of cavalry, two of dragoons, three of mounted infantry; the regiments were scattered widely. Of the 197 companies in the army, 179 occupied 79 isolated posts in the West, the remaining 18 manned garrisons east of the Mississippi River along the Canada–United States border and on the Atlantic coast. With the Southern slave states declaring secession from the Union, with this drastic shortage of men in the army, President Abraham Lincoln called on the states to raise a force of 75,000 men for three months to put down this subversive insurrection.
Lincoln's call forced the border states to choose sides, four seceded, making the Confederacy eleven states strong. It turned out that the war itself proved to be much longer and far more extensive in scope and scale than anyone on either side, Union North or Confederate South, expected or imagined at the outset on the date of July 22, 1861; that was the day that Congress approved and authorized subsidy to allow and support a volunteer army of up to 500,000 men to the cause. The call for volunteers was met by patriotic Northerners and immigrants who enlisted for a steady income and meals. Over 10,000 Germans in New York and Pennsylvania responded to Lincoln's call, the French were quick to volunteer; as more men were needed, the number of volunteers fell and both money bounties and forced conscription had to be turned to. Between April 1861 and April 1865, at least 2,128,948 men served in the Union Army, of whom the majority were volunteers, it is a misconception that the South held an advantage because of the large percentage of professional officers who resigned to join the Confederate army.
At the start of the war, there were 824 graduates of the U. S. Military Academy on the active list. Of the 900 West Point graduates who were civilians, 400 returned to the Union Army and 99 to the Confederate. Therefore, the ratio of Union to Confederate professional officers was 642 to 283; the South did have the advantage of other military colleges, such as The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute, but they produced fewer officers. Though officers were able to resign, enlisted soldiers did not have this right. While the total number of those is unknown, only 26 enlisted men and non-commissioned officers of the regular army are known to have left the army to join the Confederate army when the war began; the Union Army was composed of numerous organizations, which were organized geographically. Military division A collection of Departments reporting to one commander. Military Divisions were similar to the more modern term Theater. Department An organization that covered a defined region, including responsibilities for the Federal installations therein and for the field armies within their borders.
Those named for states referred to Southern states, occupied. It was more common to name departments for regions. District A subdivision of a Department
