Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

Well, we’ve now confirmed that we have at least one person who reads Touch the Elbow. Not half bad, what eh? Jimmy Quackenbros of Muscatine, Iowa sent an email saying he was, of all things, a fan and that my approaching trip to Gettysburg had inspired him to include an attachment with his email. He also posed a very serious and difficult question. Who would win a steel cage grudge match between Benjamin “The Beast” Butler and the current reigning WWE champion The Undertaker? Jimmy thought "The Beast" would win, because anybody nicknamed "The Beast" had to be "a very, very bad man." Jimmy’s mother Helen added in a post script: “Jimmy reads very well for a seven year old.”

While Donald has been happily visiting all over the place and sending fantastic pictures of said visits all over the Intraweb (a “The Simpsons” reference); I’ve been stuck trying to get a house ready to sell so that I can move into a new one that is part of a housing development named after a plantation that never existed. I know, only in South Carolina.

That isn’t to say I haven’t been enjoying Civil War related life, quite the contrary. Lots of new books, a visit (two actually) with an author and lots of crazy comments keep surrounding me. I’ll have to talk about those later.

Now though, I thought I would show a picture of a wonderful shirt that I just bought for myself and my son. I’ll let it do the talking.


This can be yours for the small price of $15 at http://shirt.woot.com/friends.aspx?k=5229. My son begged for it when he saw it. He is becoming quite the History Geek like his dad!

You stand in any checkout line and you can’t help but notice People magazine. No, I didn’t buy a copy, but the latest edition touted actress Kate Hudson as the most beautiful of the beautiful. Kate Hudson? Ok, what do I know? I’m not certain of the criteria or how the selection is made, but my guess would be by a small group sitting in a room at Time-Life tossing comments back and forth.

So a comparison is in order between 2008’s standard of beauty versus the Civil War’s standard of beauty. And who better to represent the latter than Kate Chase, the daughter of Treasury Secretary Salmon P., reputed to be the most beautiful woman in all of Washington and who, legend has it, drove Mary Lincoln to fits of jealousy.





Done looking? Ok, then lets move on to Martinsburg, West Virginia where another legendary beauty, Belle Boyd, got her start in life as a femme fatale and Confederate spy extraordinaire. Called the “Cleopatra of Secession,” Belle reportedly charmed her way into the lusting hearts and minds of more Union officers than any other woman of the South, using those charms to develop information and track Union troop movements. She was rewarded with a personal note of thanks from Stonewall Jackson, the Southern Cross of Honor, an honorary captaincy, and three short stints in Washington's Old Capitol Prison for her efforts on behalf of the Confederate States of America. Ironically she'd take a Union Naval officer as the first of three husbands and die in 1900 while on her way to lecture at a Grand Army of the Republic Post in Wisconsin. Seems the boys in blue couldn't get enough of her right up to the very end.