Infinite Wisdom

"I never heard music so fascinating and grand as that of battle."

La Triviata

• Discovered by A. E. Thatcher on April 5, 1861, Comet C/1861 G, a long-period body which became visible to the naked eye in July, was at the time regarded by many as a sign heralding the coming of the Civil War.
• In the ante bellum period, cadets at West Point were barred from bathing more than once a week, and then had to do so using cold water.
• Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet may have had the most effective method of disposing of sensitive documents: having finished reading his copy of Lee’s General Order No. 191 (another copy of which became the famous “Lost Order” of the Antietam Campaign) he reportedly chewed it up and then swallowed it.
• In the true spirit of “fraternal socialism,” while both were in London in 1850-1851, an ideological dispute led August von Willich (later a pretty good Union brigadier) to challenge fellow revolutionary Karl Marx to a duel.
• Apprehended in uniform near an army camp in Virginia, two women plying a trade easily as old as soldiering told military authorities that they were merely doing their bit for the cause, and that if all the women of the Confederacy were as patriotic as they, the war would have long been over.
• At one point during the siege of Vicksburg, while viewing Confederate lines from an observation tower, Union general James McPherson’s carelessness in exposing himself led a Reb to shout that if he didn’t duck he’d likely get his head shot off; whereupon the Reb’s officer reprimanded him for swearing at a superior officer.
• On June 8, 1863, Colonel William Orton Williams and his cousin Lieutenant Walter G. Peter, kinsmen of Mary Custis Lee, were arrested behind Federal lines near Franklin, Tennessee, in Union uniform while on some secret mission (unknown even today), and after a hasty court martial and confirmation of their sentences by Brig. Gen. James A. Garfield were hanged the next morning.
• Of the estimated 150,000-200,000 men who served in the Army of Northern Virginia from June of 1862 to the end of the war, some 30,000 died from combat, 125,000 suffered wounds not mortal (often more than one), and over 20,000 died of disease.

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