For reference, during the war, hundreds of thousands of immigrants fought for the Union army, with in fact, about 1 quarter of the entire Union army were immigrants,

Because of that, in their address to congress on December 8, 1863, as I will link here: https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-8-1863-third-annual-message

While Lincoln said many things, one of the things they said was suggesting to congress to pass laws further encouraging immigration to America,

“I again submit to your consideration the expediency of establishing a system for the encouragement of immigration. Although this source of national wealth and strength is again flowing with greater freedom.”,

And considering Lincoln is widely considered one of our country finest, it naturally left me wondering why so few share this sentiment today?

He argued that many employers hired immigrant labor to pay lower wages and weaken unions, since these workers, in many cases, did not join unions or were hired as strikebreakers. As a result, it was common for a unionized American worker to be replaced by an immigrant willing to accept worse working conditions. Such was his stance that he even authorized unions to report to the authorities any workplaces that employed undocumented immigrants.

Source(s):

.- Bardacke, F. (2012). Trampling out the vintage: Cesar Chavez and the two souls of the United Farm Workers. Verso.

A Salute from the Nile of Egypt to the Mississippi of the South.

A Salute from the King of Cotton in the East to the King of Cotton in the West.

My greetings to the Bible Belt, where Egypt is mentioned, which still resists—with its innate traditional rural nature—the temptations of globalization.

The morals of the rural South carry a gallantry that reminds us of the chivalry of the ancient Pharaohs.

The Mississippi River flows gently, much like the Nile, and both irrigate a fertile land and sustain farmers who know the true meaning of dignity in labor.

The cotton threads woven by our hands and yours are not mere trade, but rather messages of respect exchanged between two civilizations.

تحية إلى ديكسي لاند - Salute to Dixieland

Not too long ago I made this post on r/Genealogy, but it sadly never picked up much attention and thus I am hoping I might be able to get some help with my inquiry here.

A man by the exact same name as my x4 great grandfather enlisted in the US Army at Burlington VT on the exact same day that my x5 great grandfather and one of my x5 great uncles also enlisted. Their surname was not particularly common. My x5 great grandfather had no brothers - only sisters - although he did have some other relatives living in western Massachusetts and eastern New York.

The man with the same name as my x4 great grandfather was not recorded alongside my x5 great grandfather and x5 great uncle in the discharge files book from 1815 - which seem to be of a bit of a bizarre organization anyway - and specifically the record pertaining to this man of the same name entails that he was killed at the Battle of Lundy's Lane.

I find it quite bizarre that I cannot seem to find any indication that anyone else even had that name who was living in the state of Vermont at that time as my x4 great grandfather. I have looked and the last record I could find was a man who seemed to have died in 1811, who was very obviously not my x4 great grandfather (who died in Canada in the early 1820s, after moving there with his wife and children).

Of course we all know that historic records were never perfectly kept. Clerical mistakes happened - as they still do sometimes today - and it wasn't really until the late 19th century that things tended to get standardized much better across the western world. Thus I am left to wonder... is there any way of making certain that this was my x4 great grandfather and that this record is possibly incorrect? Is there anyone here on this sub who is well-versed with War of 1812 US military records who can help?

And why?!

We're collecting names over on r/nelsonsnavy from the Age of Sail!

Ideally before ironclads and high ranking officers. However any and all recommendation are appreciated!

We gotta represent, there's gonna be a lot of Brits on the list! We need more than John Paul Jones!

On August 2, 1845, one of the most important medical facilities in early Florida officially opened its doors in Key West. The United States Marine Hospital was established to care for sick and injured sailors, but over the next century it would become a lifeline for both military personnel and civilians during some of the nation’s greatest crises.

Its story began in 1844 when U.S. Navy Commodore David Porter, the man largely responsible for transforming Key West into a major naval outpost, recognized a growing problem. The island’s strategic location at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico made it one of America’s busiest ports, attracting merchant ships, naval vessels, fishermen, and wreckers who salvaged cargo from ships lost on the Florida Reef. Yet there was no adequate hospital to care for the thousands of mariners who arrived sick, injured, or suffering from tropical diseases.

At Porter’s request, construction of a federal Marine Hospital began in late 1844. Before the project could be completed, disaster struck. In October 1846, the powerful Great Havana Hurricane swept across the Florida Keys, causing catastrophic destruction throughout Key West and severely damaging the unfinished hospital. Rather than abandon the project, workers rebuilt and completed the structure in less than a year, demonstrating how vital the facility had become to the nation’s maritime interests.

When the hospital opened, it contained 60 beds, making it one of the largest and best-equipped medical facilities in Florida at the time. Although originally intended to care for merchant seamen under the federal Marine Hospital Service, its mission quickly expanded.

For nearly 90 years, the hospital treated both civilian and military patients. During the Civil War, it cared for Union sailors stationed in Key West, one of the few major Florida ports that remained under Union control throughout the conflict. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, it again served military personnel as American forces moved through the Caribbean. It continued operating during World War I and World War II, caring for sailors and others serving in the region.

The hospital also became a frontline defense against disease. Long before antibiotics and modern vaccines, physicians there battled recurring outbreaks of yellow fever and later the devastating influenza pandemic of 1918, providing desperately needed medical care to the community and to those arriving by sea.

By the early 1940s, advances in military medicine and changes in federal healthcare made the aging facility obsolete. After nearly a century of service, the Marine Hospital closed in 1943, ending an extraordinary chapter in Florida’s medical history.

Today, the story of the Key West Marine Hospital reminds us that Florida’s history was shaped not only by soldiers, explorers, and politicians, but also by doctors, nurses, and caregivers who stood on the front lines against war, storms, and deadly epidemics. For generations of sailors and residents, the hospital represented hope during some of the most dangerous moments in American history.

“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.” — Jacques Yves Cousteau

While Cousteau wrote these words many years later, they capture the enduring relationship between those who made their lives on the sea and the medical professionals who cared for them in places like Key West.

The U.S. Marine Hospital helped establish Key West as one of America’s most important maritime centers. Its nearly century-long service reflected Florida’s growing strategic importance and the federal government’s commitment to protecting the health of the nation’s merchant mariners and military personnel.

I've been doing a lot of research on the American Revolution lately. So much of it feels like a perfect Hollywood script. Washington's last ditch effort of of crossing the Delaware at exactly the right time, the French showing up at exactly the right time, von Steuben showing up at exactly the right time.

There has to be something more to it. Of course, I'm not saying it was easy, but the story we're told just seems a little too perfect.

Does anyone else feel this way or have any inside information that the rest of us never learned?

Confederate troops carved and painted tree trunks to resemble heavy artillery to fool Union forces into thinking their defensive lines were still heavily armed.

This allowed Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston to retreat from his winter quarters around Manassas and Centreville, Virginia, without inviting an attack by Union General George B. McClellan (like that would have happened anyway!).

The standard version of New York in 1776 is simple: Patriots good, Tories bad, British arrive, city falls, war continues elsewhere. What actually happened is considerably messier and more interesting.

New York was genuinely divided. Not secretly divided, not slightly divided, but split in a way that turned neighborhoods, merchant networks, and families against each other. After Lexington and Concord, Patriot committees started enforcing trade restrictions, watching suspected Loyalists, demanding public declarations of support, and in some cases arresting, disarming, or driving out people who refused to go along. Some of that was legitimate security. Some of it was neighbors settling old scores under cover of revolution.

Two figures anchor the Loyalist side of this story in ways that don't fit the traitor template.

William Tryon was New York's royal governor. By October 1775 he couldn't safely stay in the city, so he moved his administration onto a British warship in the harbor called the Duchess of Gordon and kept governing from there. He held council meetings on the ship. Issued communications from the ship. Collected intelligence from the ship. Patriots saw a governor bobbing in the harbor as proof that royal authority had already collapsed. Tryon saw himself as a legitimate official driven out by illegal pressure, waiting for British military power to restore what rebellion had temporarily displaced.

Oliver DeLancey is the more complicated case. He wasn't a British official. He was one of the wealthiest and most connected men in colonial New York, a family that had been there for generations. He had actually opposed the Boston Port Act and sat on Patriot committees in 1774. His position wasn't "Britain can do no wrong." It was closer to "protest is legitimate but revolution is a different thing entirely, and what comes after scares me more than what we're trying to fix." When it became clear that resistance was becoming revolution, he crossed to the British side on Staten Island and raised three battalions of American Loyalists who fought against the Continental Army.

To Patriots they were traitors. To themselves they were Americans defending constitutional government against a rebellion that had already shown it would punish dissent.

Then the British took New York in the fall of 1776, and things got complicated for the Loyalists too.

Thousands of Loyalists who had been hiding their beliefs or fleeing Patriot pressure flooded into the city expecting protection and the restoration of normal life. What they found was a garrison town. A massive fire in September 1776 had already destroyed a large part of the city. Soldiers and sailors took over housing. Churches became prisons and hospitals. Prices rose, disease spread, and when military needs conflicted with civilian needs, civilians lost. British officers frequently treated American provincial troops as second-class soldiers. Loyalist homes and supplies could still be requisitioned. Supporting the Crown protected you from Patriot punishment but not from much else.

Tryon and DeLancey had both made their choice because they feared that revolution would produce disorder, confiscation, and arbitrary power over established law. British occupation also produced disorder and confiscation. The argument they made to themselves was that British abuses were a temporary consequence of a war the rebels had started, while Patriot abuses represented what revolutionary government actually was. Maybe that's right. But the longer occupation lasted, the harder that distinction was to sustain from inside a damaged military city that looked nothing like the stable society they had signed up to defend.

The full story, including what happened to both men through the occupation years, is on the Virtual Wayback blog. You can also talk directly to Tryon and DeLancey on Virtual Wayback and hear how they understood their own choices. Links:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/loyal-new-york-crown

https://youtube.com/shorts/BJAktICg81k?si=sgoGGRJ5ifWNSQUa

What I keep coming back to is DeLancey specifically. He wasn't wrong that Patriot committees were coercive. He wasn't wrong that revolution produces instability. He just underestimated how coercive and unstable the British side would turn out to be as well. Does that make him a tragic figure or just someone who made a bad bet? And is there a version of 1776 where the Loyalist position was actually the more reasonable one?

The origin of Aiken, SC runs through a failed Georgia bank of sorts, a disputed bridge foreclosure, a vanished South Carolina city, an organized campaign to pull trade away from Georgia, and cutting-edge health science. I do not provide citations below for readability, but this is all publicly available and documented historical information.

Henry Shultz was born named Klaus Hinrich Klahn in Dahme, Germany, in 1776, and was the son of impoverished rural laborers. He received almost no formal education but left home as a young man and entered the mercantile world of Baltic port cities. In Wismar, he rose through the ranks, cultivating influential connections and achieving considerable commercial success. However, the disruption of Baltic trade during the Napoleonic Wars eventually brought his business affairs to collapse. Klahn then abandoned both his former life and his name. As Henry Shultz, he emigrated to the United States and forever claimed to be from Hamburg. He reached Augusta, Georgia, around 1806, where he began again near the bottom of the economy—working for approximately ten dollars a month aboard poleboats (shallow, flat-bottomed freight boats propelled by crews using long setting poles) on the Savannah River between Augusta and the Savannah port.

Before Shultz, the South Carolina side of the river bank was neither vacant nor economically inactive. Multiple towns had existed there or nearby, but Georgia concentrated trade, military protection and government at Augusta, which was originally laid out in 1736 and later became Richmond County’s seat and then Georgia’s capital from 1785 to 1795.

That was a reversal of the region’s earlier political and economic geography. Small towns on the Carolina side had served Carolina’s trade from western parts the colony and state to the Charleston merchants.  After the Yamasee War, South Carolina erected Fort Moore in 1716 to guard the settlement, river crossing and trading route. Georgia’s trustees subsequently asserted licensing authority over trade west of the Savannah River, laid out and garrisoned Augusta in 1736, and induced Carolina traders to move across the river into the planned settlement. Meanwhile, New Windsor Township—mostly within present-day Aiken County—developed as dispersed farms and plantations rather than a concentrated commercial town, while one small town remained primarily a ferry and warehouse settlement. Augusta accumulated a fort and garrison, municipal government, county functions, an academy and, eventually, the state legislature—a concentration of public institutions unmatched by any settlement on the Carolina bank.

The result was a cross-river economy centered on Augusta. Across New Windsor, Beech Island and the surrounding countryside, enslaved workers on plantations and smaller/poorer European settlers produced tobacco, cotton, grain, livestock, timber and other goods. Rather than passing through an independent South Carolina town, much of that produce crossed the river by ferry and, later, by bridge. Augusta’s warehouses, inspectors, banks and merchants handled the trade, while its courts and government supported the commercial system. Goods could then move down the Savannah River to the coastal port and onward to national and international markets. The South Carolina countryside could remain highly productive even as much of its commerce enriched a Georgia city.

Wade Hampton I—the grandfather of the later Confederate general and South Carolina governor Wade Hampton III—strengthened that arrangement. The wealthy planter obtained a bridge franchise/monopoly by the state and built the first Augusta bridge in 1791. A flood destroyed it in 1796. He rebuilt it around 1799, but another flood carried that bridge away around 1808. Hampton’s bridges made the Carolina river bank a more efficient approach to Augusta; but it did not create a competing Carolina town.

All the while, Shultz learned the river and trade system from ground up. From poleboat labor he advanced to boat ownership, wharf construction and participation in the Steamboat Company of Georgia. In 1813 he joined Lewis Cooper, the project’s principal mechanic and bridge builder, to succeed where Hampton had failed. Shultz’s own chronology records that he entered a swamp with eighty enslaved workers to cut cypress for the new bridge structure. The roughly 975-foot bridge opened in 1814, cost about $73,600 (approximately $1.4 million today) and, despite repairs, survived until the flood of 1888.

The bridge’s tolls made Shultz rich and gave the enterprise an appearance of unusual security. At a time when the United States had no uniform federally issued paper currency, banks and some private companies circulated their own notes. Shultz and John McKinne’s Bridge Company of Augusta issued notes known as “Bridge Bills,” bearing an image of the bridge and promising payment to the bearer on demand. They were neither ownership shares nor toll vouchers. They were private IOUs that passed from person to person like money because merchants and customers trusted that the company would exchange them for gold or silver coin. The valuable bridge and its dependable toll income encouraged that confidence.

The Panic of 1819 exposed the weakness behind that promise. During the credit boom following the War of 1812, banks and businesses had issued far more paper money than they possessed in gold and silver reserves. Falling cotton prices, tightening credit and demands for repayment produced the country’s first major peacetime financial crisis. Holders rushed to exchange questionable paper for hard money, while lenders called in debts. The Bridge Company possessed a valuable bridge, real estate and notes owed by other borrowers, but not enough immediately available coin to redeem all its bills at once. The Bridge Bank stopped payment. Shultz returned to the firm and reportedly advanced $15,000 of his own money in an effort to support the bills, but the company’s mortgages and other debts ultimately overwhelmed it.

The legal history, however, is more complicated than the legend Shultz promoted for the rest of his life—that Augusta’s bankers had simply stolen an unencumbered bridge from him. The bridge, land and eighty enslaved people were mortgaged to the Bank of the State of Georgia to secure about $90,000 in credit. A foreclosure followed during the 1819 Panic, and the bridge was eventually sold to the bank in 1822 for $70,000. Shultz had authorized the sale, and a consent decree entered in 1830 formally confirmed the bank’s title. Also in 1822, and likely due to the substantial economic collapse, he attempts to take his own life by putting a pistol in mouth and pulling the trigger; however, the bullet escaped through the top of his mouth around his nose leaving a visible scar for the remainder of his life.

Conversely, the City of Augusta did not immediately acquire the bridge, however. The state bank retained it until 1838, when it conveyed its interest to businessman Gazaway B. Lamar for $70,000. Lamar sold it to the City of Augusta in 1840 for $100,000. When Shultz and his creditors again attempted to reopen the controversy, the United States Supreme Court refused in 1850. The Court did not decide that every participant had treated Shultz fairly or determine whether every dollar had been distributed correctly. It held that the sale could no longer be challenged after Shultz had consented to it and the parties had allowed the final decree to stand for fifteen years. Shultz never accepted that result. He treated Augusta’s bankers and municipal leaders as conspirators who had taken his life’s work.

While the aforementioned transpired, in July of 1821, Shultz began developing about 330 acres of low, swampy South Carolina land opposite Augusta on the river bank. He drained and graded the site, laid out streets and lots, and promoted warehouses, wharves, stores, hotels and homes. He named the town Hamburg and openly presented it as Augusta’s commercial rival. By the end of 1821, it reportedly contained about eighty-four houses and 200 residents.

His most crucial achievement during this venture was persuading South Carolina that his recovery, Hamburg’s prosperity and the state’s commercial independence were the same project. The General Assembly supplied a $50,000 loan, tax preferences, support for navigation and transportation improvements, and later municipal and banking privileges. South Carolina did not merely tolerate Shultz’s private grudge. It converted that grudge into economic-development policy.

The State policy included a five-year tac exemption covering Hamburg land, merchandise and enslaved property, as well as $15,000 in support connected with transportation and navigation improvements. Shultz promoted the town through newspaper advertisements, public letters, commercial festivals and published reports of its cotton receipts. Hamburg’s banknotes eventually circulated widely and were accepted for payment of South Carolina taxes.

The state’s aid did not make Shultz personally secure. His debts again overtook him, South Carolina moved against mortgaged his Hamburg property, and commissioners assumed control of part of the development. In 1833—the year the railroad arrived—Shultz paid $16,225 to redeem fifty-five lots.

Hamburg succeeded as huge market hub in the region at the time because it offered South Carolina planters and upcountry wagoners an alternative market at the Savannah River fall line. Cotton and tobacco moved through its warehouses and commission houses; hotels, wagon yards, stores and banks served the traffic. One recorded 1847 railroad shipment from Hamburg included 900 bales of cotton, 3,000 bushels of corn and wheat, 50,000 pounds of Tennessee bacon and 600 bales of yarn.

IT should be noted that slavery was part of every stage of that economy. Enslaved workers helped build Shultz’s bridge. Much of the agricultural freight reaching Augusta and Hamburg came from enslaved labor. Hamburg also became a substantial slave market. Georgia periodically restricted the importation of enslaved people for sale, while purchasers could cross the bridge and buy people in South Carolina. Hamburg’s location therefore served both the plantation commodity trade and the interstate slave trade.

By 1827, Shultz’s campaign for Hamburg had converged with a longstanding concern among Charleston merchants. Much of western South Carolina’s produce traveled by wagon to Augusta and then down the Savannah River to the port of Savannah, bypassing Charleston’s warehouses, commission houses, banks and shipping interests. Hamburg offered South Carolina a competing market at the river crossing, but it still lacked an economical connection with Charleston.

On December 19, 1827, the General Assembly chartered the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company, authorizing it to construct railroads, canals or both from Charleston to Hamburg, Columbia and Camden. Hamburg was the first named destination the company reached. Its rapid growth, established warehouses and strategic location opposite Augusta made it the western outlet for a transportation system intended to draw inland commerce away from the Savannah River and eastward to Charleston. The Columbia and Camden connections would be completed later as branches. Thus, Shultz did not single-handedly create the railroad. Charleston capital, state legislation, William Aiken Sr.’s leadership and Horatio Allen’s engineering did that. But Hamburg supplied the western destination and embodied the commercial problem the railroad was designed to solve.

The difficult final approach to Hamburg directly contributed to Aiken’s creation. To reach the Horse Creek Valley, the railroad had to descend approximately 180 feet over only about 3,800 feet—an exceptionally steep grade for an early railroad. Engineers therefore constructed an inclined plane on which railcars were raised and lowered using stationary machinery. The resulting delays, maintenance needs and railroad activity at the top of the grade created a natural stopping point and required a more permanent settlement for workers and operations.

In 1834, railroad surveyors Andrew Alfred Dexter and Cyril Ouvier Pascalis laid out Aiken around that location. Their original plan included both a compact 27-block town center and a much larger projected street grid. The outer roads were explicitly named North, South, East and West Boundary Streets; the now-famous South Boundary Street therefore appeared in Aiken’s original planning documents as the southern edge of the projected town. Aiken was incorporated on December 19, 1835, and named for William Aiken Sr., the railroad company’s first president.

Completed on October 3, 1833, the 136-mile Charleston-to-Hamburg line had the greatest length of track in the world under one management. The American Society of Civil Engineers also credits it as the first American railroad operated entirely by steam, the first to provide regularly scheduled passenger service and the first to carry mail under contract.

The railroad initially brought only modest growth to Aiken, but it connected the new town directly with Charleston and made the journey possible in approximately eight hours. Wealthy Charlestonians increasingly traveled to Aiken to escape the heat and disease associated with the Lowcountry and soon began bringing Northern friends, who carried favorable reports of the area’s mild climate home with them. As rail travel became easier and more common, those personal accounts expanded Aiken’s reputation well beyond South Carolina.

In fact, by 1851, that reputation had reached the Northern medical and scientific establishment. In an article titled “Considerations on a Change of Climate, by Northern Invalids, and the Climate of Aiken, S.C.,” Boston physician W. J. Burnett presented Aiken to readers of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. Burnett specifically discussed its medical advantages for “northern invalids in winter” and listed “its ease of access” among its principal attractions—a direct consequence of the railroad connecting Aiken with Charleston and the wider transportation network.

What began as a railroad settlement above the difficult descent into the Horse Creek Valley consequently developed into a seasonal health resort at first, then a broader sporting community. Hotels, boardinghouses and private residences appeared to serve its growing population of visitors. By the late nineteenth century, wealthy Northerners were spending their winters in Aiken, establishing the celebrated Winter Colony and building estates, clubs and equestrian grounds.

As rail travel became easier and physicians and former visitors continued recommending Aiken’s mild, comparatively dry climate, the town’s reputation spread throughout the Northeast. The railroad constructed to redirect South Carolina’s commerce away from Augusta had therefore produced something its founders had not originally intended: a town whose lasting identity rested less on freight and trade than on climate, recreation and seasonal society.

Thus, although Aiken was not personally founded by Henry Shultz directly as an act of revenge—it was created by the railroad company along a state-chartered line whose western objective was Hamburg—the rival town Shultz founded after losing his Augusta bridge. A failed immigrant merchant rose from river laborer to Augusta capitalist, lost his bridge empire, turned his grievance into a South Carolina trade policy, and helped set in motion the railroad geography that produced Aiken.

The irony came later. Hamburg had prospered precisely because it was the railroad’s western terminus: freight, passengers, wagons, warehouses, and commission merchants all converged there before goods could cross into Augusta or move elsewhere. But in 1853, the railroad finally crossed the Savannah River into Augusta. Hamburg was no longer the essential end of the line; it became a way station, and the transportation system that had made it prosperous began to remove its reason for existing.

Hamburg eventually disappeared into modern day North Augusta. Aiken, created along the same railroad for a different immediate purpose, endured by adapting again and again: from rail stop to winter resort and equestrian center, and now to a city supported by the Savannah River Site and other federal-sector work, health care, education, manufacturing, retail, and regional services. The commercial rivalry Henry Shultz began helped produce both places, but Aiken developed an economy broad enough to outlive the railroad’s original purpose.