Mathew Brady
Mathew B. Brady was one of the earliest photographers in American history, best known for his scenes of the Civil War, he studied under inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who pioneered the daguerreotype technique in America. Brady opened his own studio in New York in 1844, photographed Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, among other public figures; when the Civil War started, his use of a mobile studio and darkroom enabled vivid battlefield photographs that brought home the reality of war to the public. Thousands of war scenes were captured, as well as portraits of generals and politicians on both sides of the conflict, though most of these were taken by his assistants, rather than by Brady himself. After the war, these pictures went out of fashion, the government did not purchase the master-copies as he had anticipated. Brady's fortunes declined and he died in debt. Brady was born on May 18, 1822, in Warren County, New York, near Lake George, the youngest of three children of Irish immigrant parents and Samantha Julia Brady.
He himself said that he was born in Ireland. At age 16, Brady moved to Saratoga, New York, where he met portrait painter William Page, became Page's student. In 1839, the two traveled to Albany, New York, to New York City, where Brady continued to study painting with Page, with Page's former teacher, Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse had met Louis Jacques Daguerre in France in 1839, returned to the US to enthusiastically push the new daguerreotype invention of capturing images. At first, Brady's involvement was limited to manufacturing leather cases, but soon he became the center of the New York artistic colony. Morse opened offered classes. In 1844, Brady opened his own photography studio at the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street in New York in 1844, by 1845, he began to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans, including the likes of Senator Daniel Webster and poet Edgar Allan Poe. In 1849, he opened a studio at 625 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D. C. where he met Juliet Handy, whom he lived with on Staten Island.
Brady's early images were daguerreotypes, he won many awards for his work. In 1850, Brady produced The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, a portrait collection of prominent contemporary figures; the album, which featured noteworthy images including the elderly Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage, was not financially rewarding but invited increased attention to Brady's work and artistry. In 1854, Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri popularized the carte de visite and these small pictures became a popular novelty. In 1856, Brady placed an ad in the New York Herald offering to produce "photographs and daguerreotypes." This inventive ad pioneered, in the US, the use of typeface and fonts that were distinct from the text of the publication and from that of other advertisements. At first, the effect of the Civil War on Brady's business was a brisk increase in sales of cartes de visite to departing soldiers. Brady marketed to parents the idea of capturing their young soldiers' images before they might be lost to war by running an ad in The New York Daily Tribune that warned, "You cannot tell how soon it may be too late."
However, he was soon taken with the idea of documenting the war itself. He first applied to an old friend, General Winfield Scott, for permission to travel to the battle sites, he made his application to President Lincoln himself. Lincoln granted permission with the proviso that Brady finance the project himself, his efforts to document the American Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio onto the battlefields earned Brady his place in history. Despite the dangers, financial risk, discouragement by his friends, Brady was quoted as saying "I had to go. A spirit in my feet said'Go,' and I went." His first popular photographs of the conflict were at the First Battle of Bull Run, in which he got so close to the action that he avoided capture. While most of the time the battle had ceased before pictures were taken, Brady came under direct fire at the First Battle of Bull Run and Fredericksburg, he employed Alexander Gardner, James Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, William Pywell, George N. Barnard, Thomas C.
Roche, seventeen other men, each of whom was given a traveling darkroom, to go out and photograph scenes from the Civil War. Brady stayed in Washington, D. C. organizing his assistants and visited battlefields personally. However, as author Roy Meredith points out, "He was the director; the actual operation of the camera though mechanical is important, but the selection of the scene to be photographed is as important, if not more so than just'snapping the shutter.'"This may have been due, at least in part, to the fact that Brady's eyesight had begun to deteriorate in the 1850s. Many of the images in Brady's collection are, in reality, thought to be the work of his assistants. Brady was criticized for failing to document the work, though it is unclear whether it was intentional or due to a lack of inclination to document the photographer of a specific image; because so much of Brady's photography is missing information, it is difficult to know not only who took the picture, but exactly when or where it was taken
Third from the Sun
"Third from the Sun" is episode 14 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It is based on a short story of the same name by Richard Matheson which first appeared in the first issue of the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction in October 1950. Will Sturka, a scientist who works at a military base, has been producing a great number of H-bombs in preparation for imminent nuclear war. Sturka realizes that there is only one way to escape—steal an experimental, top-secret spacecraft stored at the base, he plans to bring Sturka's daughter Jody. The two plot for months, making arrangements for their departure; when production of the bombs increases, Sturka realizes. He and Riden decide to put their plan in action—take their families to the craft to tour it, overpower the guards and take off. Sturka's superior Carling overhears the two men talking; that night, everyone gathers for a game of cards where Riden reveals that he has found a place to go—a small planet 11 million miles away. During the game, Carling unexpectedly appears at the door and hints that he knows what the group is planning.
He hints at trouble: "A lot can happen in forty-eight hours." After he leaves and Riden inform the women that they must leave that moment. When the five arrive at the site of the spacecraft and Riden spot their contact, who flashes a light; when the contact steps forward, though, he is revealed to be Carling, armed with a gun. He prepares to call the authorities; the women, who have been waiting in the car, watch as Carling orders them out. Jody throws the car's door open, knocking the gun from Carling's hand and giving the men enough time to overpower him; the group rushes into the ship. That evening, the group has safely escaped their doomed planet and are on course. Sturka comments. Riden smiles as he points out on the ship's viewer their mysterious destination, 11 million miles away—the third planet from the Sun, called "Earth". Todd VanDerWerff of The A. V. Club rated it A and called the twist "justifiably famous". "Probe 7, Over and Out", another Twilight Zone episode with a similar plot. "The Invaders", another episode in which a farm woman encounters tiny "alien" astronauts, who are Earthlings.
"Death Ship" is a TZ episode again featuring the Forbidden Planet Cruiser, where explorers find their ship E-89 has somehow crashed on the alien planet they have just found. Ancient astronaut theory DeVoe, Bill.. Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0 Grams, Martin.. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0 "Third from the Sun" on IMDb "Third from the Sun" at TV.com Matheson, Richard. "Third from the Sun". Galaxy Science Fiction. P. 61. Retrieved 17 October 2013
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
Mirror Image (The Twilight Zone)
"Mirror Image" is episode 21 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It aired on February 26, 1960 on CBS. Millicent Barnes waits in a bus depot in Marathon, New York, for a bus to Cortland, en route to a new job. Looking at a wall clock she notices, she asks the ticket agent when the bus will arrive, he gruffly complains that this is her third time asking. Millicent denies this. While speaking with the ticket agent, she notices a bag just like hers in the luggage pile behind her, she mentions this to the ticket agent. She does not believe this, she washes her hands in the restroom and the cleaning lady there insists this is her second time there. Again, Millicent denies this. Upon leaving the restroom, she glances in the mirror and sees, in addition to her reflection, an exact copy of herself sitting on the bench outside, she meets a young man from Binghamton named Paul Grinstead, waiting for the same bus. Millicent tells Paul about encountering her double. Paul, attempting to calm Millicent, says it is either a joke or a misunderstanding caused by a look-alike.
When the bus arrives and the two of them prepare to board, Millicent looks in the window and sees the copy of herself seated on the bus. In shock, she faints. Millicent lies unconscious on a bench inside the depot while Paul and the cleaning lady attend to her. Paul agrees to wait for the 7:00 bus. While they wait, now coming to, insists the strange events are caused by an evil double from a parallel world - a nearby, yet distant alternative plane of existence that comes into convergence with this world by powerful forces, or unnatural, unknown events; when this happens, the impostors enter this realm. Millicent's doppelgänger can survive in this world only by replacing her. Paul says the explanation is "a little metaphysical" for him, believes that Millicent's sanity is beginning to unravel. Paul tells Millicent he will call a friend in Tully who has a car and may be able to drive them to Syracuse. Instead, he calls the police. After Millicent is taken away by two policemen, Paul begins to settle himself.
After drinking from a water fountain, Paul notices. Looking up towards the doors, Paul notices another man running out the door of the bus depot. Pursuing this individual down the street, Paul discovers that he is chasing his own copy, whose face shows excited delight, his copy disappears as Paul calls out "Where are you?" while looking around in confusion and shock. Vera Miles as Millicent Barnes Martin Milner as Paul Grinstead Joe Hamilton as Ticket agent Naomi Stevens as Washroom Attendant In a short film pitching the Twilight Zone series to a Dutch television station, creator Rod Serling claimed to have gotten the idea for "Mirror Image" following an encounter at an airport. Serling noticed a man at the other side of the terminal who wore the same clothes and carried the same suitcase as himself. However, the man turned out to be younger and "more attractive"; this is one of several episodes from season one with its opening title sequence plastered over with the opening for season two. This was done during the Summer of 1961 as to help the season one shows fit in with the new look the show had taken during the following season.
This episode inspired Jordan Peele's 2019 film Us. DeVoe, Bill.. Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0 Grams, Martin.. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0 "Mirror Image" on IMDb
The Big Tall Wish
"The Big Tall Wish" is episode twenty-seven of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone, with an original score by Jerry Goldsmith. It aired on April 8, 1960 on CBS. Bolie Jackson is a washed-up boxer, he is knocked down and just about to be counted out, when he magically switches places with the other boxer. Bolie is now standing over his vanquished opponent. Bolie celebrates his victory, he remembers being knocked down and has no memory of getting back up to win, nor can he figure out why his knuckles feel fine. His manager tells Bolie. Bolie figures. However, there is one other person. Henry Temple, the young son of Bolie's girlfriend Frances, not only remembers, he has an explanation for what happened. Henry tells Bolie that he made "the biggest, tallest wish" he could come up with for Bolie, for the two boxers to switch positions, it came true. Bolie cannot accept this. Henry warns him. If Bolie does not believe, the wish will not work, but he is unswayed. As soon as he rejects the idea that a wish could have been responsible for what happened, he is returned to the fight, on the canvas.
This time the referee finishes counting Bolie out. Neither Bolie nor Henry have any memory of the alternate outcome. Henry remembers making the biggest wish he could for Bolie, but it did not work, so he declares with resignation that he will not be making any more wishes. "There ain't no such thing as magic, is there?", he asks Bolie. "I guess Henry", Bolie replies sadly. "Or maybe...maybe there is magic. And maybe there's wishes, too. I guess the trouble is...there's not enough people around to believe..." Ivan Dixon as Bolie Jackson Stephen Perry as Henry Temple Kim Hamilton as Frances Temple Walter Burke as Joe Mizell Charles Horvath as Joey Consiglio Carl McIntire as Announcer The all-black principal cast was a novelty for television in 1960. Said Rod Serling at the time:Television, like its big sister, the motion picture, has been guilty of the sin of omission... Hungry for talent, desperate for the so-called'new face,' searching for a transfusion of new blood, it has overlooked a source of wondrous talent that resides under its nose.
This is the Negro actor. A few other Twilight Zones followed the example of this episode and cast blacks in significant roles, including the pastor in "I Am the Night—Color Me Black", with Ivan Dixon, a child in the mall in "The Night of the Meek", the electrician in "The Brain Center at Whipple's"; these inclusions, though insignificant by modern standards, were so revolutionary at the time that The Twilight Zone was awarded the Unity Award for Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations in 1961. Cast in the lead role was champion boxer Archie Moore, who exclaimed, "Man, I was in the Twilight Zone!" when describing the punch delivered by his opponent Yvon Durelle. This is one of several episodes from season one where some broadcast prints have the opening title sequence replaced with that of season two; this was done during the summer of 1961 to help the season one shows fit in with the new look the show had taken during the following season. They use the same hallway shown in this episode in "Mr. Bevis", episode 33, but altered.
However, the door and stair railings remain the same. The boxing match takes place at "St. Nick's Arena", the name of a boxing arena in New York City, the St. Nicholas Rink. Zircee, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 DeVoe, Bill.. Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0 Grams, Martin.. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0 "The Big Tall Wish" on IMDb
The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series)
The Twilight Zone is an American anthology television series created and presented by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. Each episode presents a stand-alone story in which characters find themselves dealing with disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone," ending with a surprise ending and a moral. Although predominantly science-fiction, the show's paranormal and Kafkaesque events leaned the show towards fantasy and horror; the phrase “twilight zone,” inspired by the series, is used to describe surreal experiences. The series featured both established stars and younger actors who would become much better known later. Serling served as executive head writer, he was the show's host and narrator, delivering monologues at the beginning and end of each episode. Serling's opening and closing narrations summarize the episode's events encapsulating how and why the main character had entered the Twilight Zone. In 1997, the episodes "To Serve Man" and "It's a Good Life" were ranked at 11 and 31 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.
Serling himself stated that his favorite episodes of the series were "The Invaders" and "Time Enough at Last". In 2016, the series was ranked No. 7 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest shows of all time. In 2002, The Twilight Zone was ranked No. 26 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked it as the third best-written TV series and TV Guide ranked it as the fourth greatest drama and the fifth greatest show of all time. By the late 1950s, Rod Serling was a prominent name in American television, his successful television plays included Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, but constant changes and edits made by the networks and sponsors frustrated Serling. In Requiem for a Heavyweight, the line "Got a match?" had to be struck because the sponsor sold lighters. But according to comments in his 1957 anthology Patterns, Serling had been trying to delve into material more controversial than his works of the early 1950s; this led to Noon on Doomsday for the United States Steel Hour in 1956, a commentary by Serling on the defensiveness and total lack of repentance he saw in the Mississippi town where the murder of Emmett Till took place.
His original script paralleled the Till case was moved out of the South and the victim changed to a Jewish pawnbroker, watered down to just a foreigner in an unnamed town. Despite bad reviews, activists sent numerous wires protesting the production. Serling thought that a science-fictional setting, with robots and other supernatural occurrences, would give him more freedom and less interference in expressing controversial ideas than more realistic settings. "The Time Element" was Serling's 1957 pilot pitch for his show, a time travel adventure about a man who travels back to Honolulu in 1941 and unsuccessfully tries to warn everyone about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. The script, was rejected and shelved for a year until Bert Granet discovered and produced it as an episode of Desilu Playhouse in 1958; the show was a great success and enabled Serling to begin production on his anthology series, The Twilight Zone. Serling's editorial sense of ironic fate in the writing done for the series was identified as significant to its success by the BFI Film Classics library which stated that for Serling "the cruel indifference and implacability of fate and the irony of poetic justice" were recurrent themes in his plots.
There is a fifth dimension, beyond that, known to man. It is a dimension as timeless as infinity, it is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination, it is an area. The Twilight Zone premiered the night of October 1959, to rave reviews. "Twilight Zone is about the only show on the air that I look forward to seeing. It's the one series that I will let interfere with other plans", said Terry Turner for the Chicago Daily News. Others agreed. Daily Variety ranked it with "the best, accomplished in half-hour filmed television" and the New York Herald Tribune found the show to be "certainly the best and most original anthology series of the year"; as the show proved popular to television's critics, it struggled to find a receptive audience of television viewers. CBS was banking on a rating of at least 21 or 22; the series' future was jeopardized when its third episode, "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" earned a 16.3 rating.
Still, the show attracted a large enough audience to survive a brief hiatus in November, after which it surpassed its competition on ABC and NBC and convinced its sponsors to stay on until the end of the season. With one exception, the first season featured scripts written only by Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson; these three were responsible for 127 of the 156 episodes in the series. Additionally, with one exception, Serling never appeared on camera during any first-season episode (as he woul
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America referred to as the Confederacy, was an unrecognized country in North America that existed from 1861 to 1865. The Confederacy was formed by seven secessionist slave-holding states—South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Texas—in the Lower South region of the United States, whose economy was dependent upon agriculture cotton, a plantation system that relied upon the labor of African-American slaves; each state declared its secession from the United States, which became known as the Union during the ensuing civil war, following the November 1860 election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the U. S. presidency on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Before Lincoln took office in March, a new Confederate government was established in February 1861, considered illegal by the government of the United States. States volunteered militia units and the new government hastened to form its own Confederate States Army from scratch overnight.
After the American Civil War began in April, four slave states of the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina—also declared their secession and joined the Confederacy. The Confederacy accepted Missouri and Kentucky as members, although neither declared secession nor were they largely controlled by Confederate forces; the government of the United States rejected the claims of secession and considered the Confederacy illegally founded. The War began with the Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, a Union fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. No foreign government recognized the Confederacy as an independent country, although Great Britain and France granted it belligerent status, which allowed Confederate agents to contract with private concerns for arms and other supplies. In early 1865, after four years of heavy fighting which led to 620,000–850,000 military deaths, all the Confederate forces surrendered and the Confederacy vanished; the war lacked a formal end.
By 1865 Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America for the duration of the civil war, lamented that the Confederacy had "disappeared". On February 22, 1862, the Confederate Constitution of seven state signatories – Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Texas – replaced the Provisional Constitution of February 8, 1861, with one stating in its preamble a desire for a "permanent federal government". Four additional slave-holding states – Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina – declared their secession and joined the Confederacy following a call by U. S. President Abraham Lincoln for troops from each state to recapture Sumter and other seized federal properties in the South. Missouri and Kentucky were represented by partisan factions adopting the forms of state governments without control of substantial territory or population in either case; the antebellum state governments in both maintained their representation in the Union. Fighting for the Confederacy were two of the "Five Civilized Tribes" – the Choctaw and the Chickasaw – in Indian Territory and a new, but uncontrolled, Confederate Territory of Arizona.
Efforts by certain factions in Maryland to secede were halted by federal imposition of martial law. A Unionist government was formed in opposition to the secessionist state government in Richmond and administered the western parts of Virginia, occupied by Federal troops; the Restored Government recognized the new state of West Virginia, admitted to the Union during the war on June 20, 1863, re-located to Alexandria for the rest of the war. Confederate control over its claimed territory and population in congressional districts shrank from 73% to 34% during the course of the American Civil War due to the Union's successful overland campaigns, its control of the inland waterways into the South, its blockade of the southern coast. With the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the Union made abolition of slavery a war goal; as Union forces moved southward, large numbers of plantation slaves were freed. Many joined the Union lines, enrolling in service as soldiers and laborers; the most notable advance was Sherman's "March to the Sea" in late 1864.
Much of the Confederacy's infrastructure was destroyed, including telegraphs and bridges. Plantations in the path of Sherman's forces were damaged. Internal movement became difficult for Southerners, weakening the economy and limiting army mobility; these losses created an insurmountable disadvantage in men and finance. Public support for Confederate President Jefferson Davis's administration eroded over time due to repeated military reverses, economic hardships, allegations of autocratic government. After four years of campaigning, Richmond was captured by Union forces in April 1865. A few days General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant signalling the collapse of the Confederacy. President Davis was captured on May 10, 1865, jailed in preparation for a treason trial, never held; the initial Confederacy was established in the Montgomery Convention in February 1861 by seven states (South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana
