Rebel with a Cause
William Bruce Mumford was an unlikely candidate for martyrdom. A native of North Carolina, he fought with honor in the Seminole and Mexican-American wars and, like many men from small Dixie towns, sought his fortune in the big city. When he discovered a knack for card games, he became a regular in the New Orleans gambling houses and found further success on the Mississippi River steamboats. Like the vast majority of Southerners, seventy five percent in fact, Mumford did not own slaves, nor did he champion the region’s “peculiar institution.” He wasn’t even particularly political, but when his beloved South and her Queen City were threatened by civil war, Mumford rushed to embrace the Confederate cause. His fierce loyalty would have terrible consequences. In...
Read MoreSouthern Discomfort
In 1861, New Orleans was the jewel in the Confederate crown, the fourth largest city in the country and unquestionably the richest in the South. With the outbreak of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln made certain this ripe plum fell hard and fast. He put her conquest at the top of his priority list for the simple reason that whoever held the city controlled the mouth of the Mississippi River, and he sweetened the deal by promising to make whoever took New Orleans a lieutenant-general in the Union Army. Anticipating the attack, the Confederacy beefed up defenses at Forts Jackson and St. Philip, which faced each other seventy miles downriver, and went on the offensive when they learned the Union Navy had entered the river from the Gulf of Mexico....
Read MoreHistory Unplugged
Most Americans know very little about the Civil War and haven’t even paid much attention to the ongoing sesquicentennial of the bloody conflict that tore our nation apart. They’ve probably heard of Gettysburg and remember the burning of Atlanta from Gone with the Wind, or at least know when the war began and ended. If you’re feeling smug now because you’re thinking about Fort Sumter and Appomattox, think again. History books say that the first shots of the Civil War were fired in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. They get the location right, but, strictly speaking, not the date. South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. A few weeks later, January 9 to be exact, a Union supply ship from New York, Star of the West, was heading for Fort...
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