05-09-2016, 10:45 PM
(05-09-2016, 07:33 PM)Danilynn Wrote: Vicksburg is 30 minutes from me.
I have relatives buried there from that siege. I can tell you from historical documents available in the museum at the Battlefield Park, it was brutal. They starved those people damn near to death. Not just the soldiers, but the townspeople too. The city graveyard has tons of graves all with the same round about period of death etched into it. The section where the kids and babies are buried from that time period are painful to see.
I'm not sure if you believe in ghosts or not, but that whole city, especially the old parts of it above the hill, are downright creepy as all get out after dark and even more so in the summer. There are places there you catch glimpses of things, and hear stuff that has absolutely no reasonable explanation what so ever. Vicksburg is a beautiful city and has stunning examples of pre-Civil War architecture. Natchez does as well, but Vicksburg is beautiful. Creepy, but beautiful. My favorite quilt pattern emerged from that battle and owes it's design to two women who lived through that siege, the quilt pattern is called "living on cornbread". It's unique in that it's origins came from being crafted out of corn meal bags and dyed with plants and painted with mud and blood to stain the material in the original. It also is on display in one of the museums in Vicksburg.
Ever want to experience the paranormal, go camping near the battlefield in early July, Late June, you won't do it twice, trust me on this, was one of the longest nights I have ever spent outdoors.
As the Awakening-Era slogan said, war is harmful to children and other living things. Such could have applied no less to the American Civil War as it did to the Vietnamese Civil War. (We might as well recognize -- the war in Vietnam really was a civil war). I would guess that the most vulnerable people were children.
I am surprised that people speak of haunted houses, for which there might be some rational explanation -- birds or bats in the attic, a draft permeating the house, or a cat or raccoon having gotten into the cellar. If any places should be haunted they would be battlefields and sites of mass murder (like fascist and communist killing grounds). Sunken ships? The Titanic ought to be a doozy. But the literature on ghosts goes only so far -- maybe ghosts can't stand water.*
...All in all I have my theory on what Abraham Lincoln was up to in 1861. He was going to abolish slavery, and he would have used the British model which had worked in the vast British Empire and would have worked in America. The British bought the slaves their freedom, which is what Congress did in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. The British freed slaves with no bloodshed. America got a war, most likely over a misunderstanding. But the British freed their slaves in a 2T; Lincoln would have freed slaves without war in a 4T. Lincoln's timing was wrong.
Corn meal is tasty, but terribly deficient in nutrition. Corn has practically no vitamins. People may have died as much of malnutrition (especially scurvy) as of starvation.
...That must have been a weird experience; June typically has the shortest nights of the year.
*If I were a ghost I wouldn't stick around some nasty place where I had died some horrible way. I'd rather haunt Yosemite National Park,
wouldn't you?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.