TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Author: Fred Ray

  • More from Carolina

    Ben Steelman takes a look at pre-bellum Wilmington: Wilmington was the largest municipality in mostly-rural North Carolina by a wide margin – New Bern, the next largest town, had only about 5,000 people – and it was growing fast. Its population had doubled in just 20 years. NC was not a cotton state—most of its […]

  • News from Carolina

    Rebel or loyalist? Sometimes it was hard to tell. On the surface, wealthy Lincolnton businessman and slaveholder John Phifer may have appeared loyal to Dixie. His textile mill on the South Fork River cranked out products much needed in the embattled South. His three sons were officers in the Confederate Army, and two died fighting […]

  • Around The Web

    The newest secession news is from Arizona, where a group of liberals in Tucson (apparently a protected area) want to form Baja Arizona. This is ironic since Tucson was a stronghold of the Confederate State of Arizona (not the same as the US state) and if you check the Wikipedia article there is a photo […]

  • Around the Web

    I have been consumed with some projects lately, which has left me no time to blog. Thanks to James and Brett for keeping the flag flying. I’ll try to surface from time to time and post some items of interest pertaining to the Late Unpleasantness. From Alexandria, LA comes a interpretive segment at a local […]

  • Thomas Lowry Admits Falsifying Document, Then Recants

    The saga of historian Thomas Lowry, who had admitted falsifying a pardon signed by Abraham Lincoln earlier this week, got a bit murkier today when he denied doing it. In a phone interview Tuesday, Lowry recanted his confession and said he offered repeated denials to Archives investigators over the course of a two-hour interview but […]

  • Assassination, Blame, and Gun Control

    In the wake of the recent shootings in Arizona, Wired magazine looks at at a Secret Service study on the motivations of assassins. Although they vary, politics plays a surprisingly small role. Contrary to popular assumptions about public killings, the attackers didn’t conform to any particular demographic profile. But when Fein reconstructed their patterns of […]

  • Lincoln Quote Genuine?

    Any Lincoln experts out there? I am looking to verify a quote attributed to him that’s been floating around the internet lately. The government, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary […]