Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i Cobblestone American History and Current Events for Kids and Children

Beginning in April 1861, two armies—both made up of American soldiers—began fighting each other in the Civil War. A few months earlier, 11 Southern states had seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy claimed to be fighting for states’ rights and against an interfering federal government. The men who remained loyal to the federal government, mostly from Northern states, volunteered for the Union army. They fought to preserve a unified nation. The war lasted four years. Union and Confederate men fought one another on land, sea, and rivers, and in battles in the North, the South, and the West. The tide of the war began to turn in 1864, when Ulysses S. Grant was named lieutenant general and commander in chief of all Union…

The spring season is hard in any agricultural society. Plants and animals are too small to eat. But in the spring of 1865 in the South, things were not just hard, they were desperate. Frightened families had abandoned their farms as Union troops invaded. No one had planted crops. Refugees, both white and Black, were just trying to survive. They crowded the roads trying to find any place that might offer food and shelter. They were at the mercy of thieves and former soldiers who traveled on the roads with them. Northerners heard from soldiers and newspaper reporters of the bad situation in the South. In Congress, men considered the government’s responsibility to help former enslaved people survive the hard times. Others pointed out that white families were starving, too.…

Tallahassee, Florida, was the only state capital in the Confederate states that was not captured during the Civil War. In the days after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton took control of the government as he led the attempt to identify and capture the conspirators. An estimated 620,000 soldiers died in the Civil War. About two thirds of those soldiers succumbed to disease. In 1870, Hiram Revels became the first Black man elected to the U.S. Congress. He won the Senate seat that Confederate president Jefferson Davis had once filled for Mississippi. According to the National Park Service, most Civil War battles took place in Virginia (122). Thirty-eight occurred within Tennessee’s boundaries, and Missouri came in third, with 29 battles.…

The last Confederate forces in the Civil War didn’t surrender in the spring of 1865 or on a battlefield. They surrendered on November 6, 1865, in Liverpool, England. How is that possible? The story begins with the start of the Civil War. After South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860, Confederate naval secretary Stephen Mallory sent agents to England to purchase ships secretly. He knew that there would be a shortage of fast, seaworthy vessels for the Confederate navy. Fast forward to 1864. A Confederate agent arranged the purchase of the British Sea King, a state-of-the-art clipper. The ship had an iron frame and a coal-burning steam engine that powered a propeller. It also had an unusual feature: The propeller could be raised up into the hull to…

Can you solve this crossword puzzle about 1865? All the answers can be found in this issue. The solution is on page 49. ACROSS 1. After nearly 10 months, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia abandoned its defensive position around _____ and Richmond in April. 3. This capital of South Carolina was mostly destroyed by fire as Confederate troops evacuated and Union troops occupied it. 4. The _____ Bureau was designed to aid in the South’s transition from slavery to freedom. 8. In some of the first action in 1865, the Confederate-held _____ _____ finally fell to a combined Union army and navy assault in January. 11. In November, sailors on the CSS _____ became the last Confederate forces to surrender.…

The terminology of weaponry associated with the Civil War has some interesting origins. A carbine is a “lightweight rifle with a short barrel.” During the Civil War, carbines were mostly used by cavalry troops (soldiers on horseback). The word comes from the French words carabine and carabin, meaning a “soldier armed with a musket.” A mortar is a “portable, muzzle-loading cannon used to fire shells at short ranges at a low velocity and a high trajectory.” The weapon looks like a super-sized version of a mortar, the bowl in which medicine and herbs are ground with a pestle. A howitzer is a “short cannon that shoots missiles at a medium velocity and a high trajectory.” It derives from the Dutch word houwitser and the German Haubitze, which mean “catapult.” Artillery…

By the afternoon of January 15, 1865, the Union navy had bombarded Fort Fisher for more than 48 hours. The fort stood on a peninsula at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. It protected the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Located about 30 miles inland, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city. It also was the only port on the Atlantic Ocean that remained under Confederate control. Blockade-runners used it as a base to carry out Southern crops of tobacco and cotton and bring in much-needed supplies for General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. It was the Union’s second attempt to take the fort. The first attack had failed in December 1864. But this time, Union major general Alfred H. Terry understood the importance of cooperating with the…

For several months, actor John Wilkes Booth’s band of conspirators had plotted to capture President Abraham Lincoln and hold him hostage in exchange for Confederate prisoners. Several early attempts had failed. With Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, Booth became desperate. “Our cause being almost lost,” he wrote in his diary, “something decisive and great must be done.” An opportunity to act came on Friday, April 14. Booth was at Ford’s Theatre when word arrived from the White House that President and Mrs. Lincoln would attend that night’s performance of Our American Cousin. Lincoln was fatalistic about security, saying that no system could stop an assassin, so he traveled with little protection. Booth called together his conspirators and mapped out a plan: While he attacked Lincoln…

Americans needed to begin to put the past behind them, come together, and plan for the future in the spring of 1865. But Abraham Lincoln, the man best equipped to lead them and who had hoped to restore the country as smoothly and peacefully as possible, had been assassinated. That summer, Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, took action while Congress was not in session. He pardoned anyone who swore allegiance to the United States, no matter what the person’s role in the Confederacy had been. He allowed former Confederate leaders to keep their political power. They, in turn, tried to return former enslaved people to a system that looked a lot like slavery. Southern leaders passed Black Codes, which were laws that restricted the new freedoms of African Americans. When…

The Civil War was the focus of attention for Americans in the years between 1861 and 1865, but other notable things happened during the final year of that conflict. A Permanent Home The New York Stock Exchange’s (NYSE) connection to New York City dates to the early 1600s, when the Dutch settled New Amsterdam (present-day New York City). Thanks to the Dutch acceptance of different peoples, New Amsterdam became an international settlement and an important trading center. In 1792, the Buttonwood Agreement established formal rules for stock trades and stockbroker commissions. In those early decades of the exchange, brokers met to trade stocks in informal places in the city, such as local coffeehouses. As the United States expanded in the 1800s, so did the role of stocks and securities. They…

On March 28, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was in City Point, Virginia, to meet with his top commanders: Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, Major General William T. Sherman, and Admiral David Dixon Porter. For nearly four years, Lincoln had watched Confederate general Robert E. Lee get out of tight spots with his army and turn defeat into victory. Despite all the signs that the war had taken its toll on the South, Lincoln feared that the conflict might drag on. Grant and Sherman assured Lincoln that the end was at hand. And they were right. Within two weeks of that meeting, Lee surrendered to Grant, and the major fighting in the war drew to an end.…

JANUARY . . . . . . . . . . . A group of African Americans stop at the White House’s annual public reception on January 1, where they shake hands with President Abraham Lincoln. On January 31, Congress passes the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and sends it off to the states for ratification. MARCH . . . . . . . . . . . On March 13, the Confederate government approves the use of enslaved men as soldiers for the Confederate cause. General Robert E. Lee requests that any man who fights be freed, but the bill does not mention freedom. On March 28, President Abraham Lincoln, generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, and Admiral David Dixon Porter meet on the River Queen at City…

Americans had fought the Civil War to see if slavery or free labor would be the system that spread across the rest of the continent. As soon as the war ended, America spread the winning system of free labor as far and as fast as it could. In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward arranged for the purchase of Alaska from Russia. At a total cost of $7.2 million, or about 2 cents per acre, it added an enormous amount of territory to the United States. Seward hoped that the acquisition would provide the United States with valuable West Coast harbors and access to trade in the Pacific. Americans had begun to head west during the war to mine and farm. When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869,…

For four years, the Civil War dominated the headlines in the United States. Here’s a look at some events that made the news in other parts of the world in 1865. KEEPING IT CLEAN In August 1865, Scottish surgeon Joseph Lister operated on an 11-year-old boy. The boy’s leg had been fractured after being run over by the wheel of a cart. Lister did something unusual, though: He swabbed the wound with a piece of lint dipped in carbolic acid. Lister changed the boy’s bandages every day, and after six weeks, he was amazed to find that the bones had healed and there was no infection at all. He was the first medical person to realize that applying antiseptics to wounds would help prevent deadly infections, such as gangrene. The…

Dear Readers, Draw a picture or write a poem or a short essay that connects to a U.S. history topic that interests you. All contributions must be your original work. Include a note from a parent or a legal guardian clearly stating: “This is my child’s original work, and COBBLESTONE has permission to publish it with my child’s name, age, and hometown, in print and online.” We will include as many as we can in an upcoming issue. Email your submission to cobblestone@cricketmedia.com.…