Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

Donald is out chasing down new clues on the 18th Massachusetts. Check back next week for more tales from the boys of the Bay State.


He has already let us know that he has found letters from a POW of Andersonville from the time he was in the prison. The letters were still in the envelopes - meaning not many people have seen them since they were first written. Hopefully he will share some of what he finds when he gets back.

I’ve always wondered how the world of Pokemon would be if Abraham Lincoln had been involved. Luckily, I don’t have to wonder anymore thanks to the fine folks at Walkingsquares.com….

Click link above to see bigger version.

It is our 1000th post and I thought I would celebrate with our first attempt at spreading the Civil War Gospel, an article (blogs were not around then) on an old Geocities site. It was when I first started researching the unit and was experiencing massive failure in doing so. Writing helped make it a tad better.

Hope you enjoy.


Tom Vs The World

Part One: The Civil War Experience

I have come to a conclusion, my luck sucks. At first, that sounds pretty awful, imagine living your life with nothing but bad luck. Yes, you are doomed to nothing ever going right but once you start thinking about it, you get used to the idea. Maybe I should clarify my "bad luck" a little bit. I have a great family, a decent job (hope my boss is not reading this, but boss if you are, IT'S A GREAT JOB!!!!!!) and living a good life. But to quote my best friend "I can't win!"

I came to the this grand deduction while searching through my family roots. Now when people get started looking up their family history, they are usually told about "the black sheep" syndrome. That's where your image of the perfect family is shattered when you discover a long lost great-great- great uncle Ebenezer who was so strange that he read a passage in the Bible and decided it meant that he should forsake the use of fire and form a nudist colony in a desolate region of Siberia, or the triple murderer cousin Joe Bob, who killed three people in Texas because they wouldn't taste his scorpion casserole. You never know what you are going to come up with, and that's a chance you take. So far I have not been able to find any black sheep, heck I can barely find anything. And that's how this whole bad luck syndrome started.

I was lucky enough to have a great-aunt give me a family genealogy going back 13 generations. After reading it I got intrigued with my ancestors. "Who were these people? What did they do? Why did they do it?" were questions that I found myself asking. I thought it would be neat to add some life to the tree by finding more information out about all these people.

Not only did he keep the union whole but now we know he kept it safe from vampires - Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. This is from the same author who brought us "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"

As much as I give my home state of South Carolina hell for, well, just about everything it does – I do have to say that an article like this warms my heart and shows that not all of the South was against the Civil Rights movement – although there was still threats.

I lived near Penn Center for a very long time. While it was established after the Civil War to educate freed slaves, it has evolved over the years and something so much more.

If you are ever near Beaufort, stop by and see a historical landmark that all can be proud of.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy."
Unless you are Google, who once again left their page blank.

Meanwhile, the Evil Empire that is Microsoft, outdid Google with its tribute on Bing

One of the things I have always found neat about Google is their whimsical logos that they put out to celebrate holidays and events. As an example, at the beginning of Spring this year, they had an homage to Eric Carle’s famous book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.


Yet today, in what could be considered the anniversary of this generation’s Pearl Harbor – how do they celebrate it? Like this

Yet if you go to Bing – Microsoft’s new Search tool found a way to mark this day in a very classy way; that brings no sensationalism to it.


Epic Fail on Google's part. If you want to see some of the holiday's and events they deem important enough to show off, look here.

I will be switching to Bing for my searching needs. I hope you will join me.

One of the best parts of living in Charleston is being able to look just about anywhere to see history all around.

Case in point, this week my wife and I did a little staycation as a getaway from it all. We stayed at a nice hotel on the Ashley River. At the top of the hotel is a nice restaurant with a beautiful view of the river and the Charleston skyline. As we sat and ate, we could see over some buildings, out into the harbor and in the distance - to the fabled Fort Sumter. Looking at the picture below, it looks like a pancake in the middle of the harbor.



Of course, then there is the made up history that is all about the South. Like this restaurant that is built to look like a fort but named California Dreaming.

Because nothing says dreaming about California like a fake fort built in the seat of the Rebellion.



Of course this is where I would normally take pot shots at the Lost Cause, the Confederate Battle Flags, Slavery wasn't the main cause of the Civil War, Heritage not Hate and a host of other things. But I have not had enough coffee today to even begin....

It has been about six months since our last post.

To put it bluntly, we have been a bit slack. Of course there were reasons.

Mine were simply crazy (and if you have followed me on Facebook you know this already) – I had bought a lot to build a house on; the developer said in the closing and mls that there was water and sewer. As we started building we found out there wasn’t the promised water and sewer. The pipes had been laid, just hadn’t been approved by the state.

While we should have been in sometime in April or May, we didn’t get in until the week before Christmas. Let me tell you, if you want a kick in the pants, stand in front of your basically complete house that only needs water and realize that you can’t move in. Now repeat that for seven months. Yeah it sucked.

This morning I started making New Years Hoppin’ John and drinking out of my 18th Massachusetts coffee mug and realized that I should start writing again.

I was hoping to write a bit more about the Gullah Culture and how it affects the new year with the making of Hoppin’ John (for luck) and Greens (for money) but the family is waking up and I will need to spend some time with them.

Instead, here is an article on Hoppin’ John

Finally, if you are on Facebook or LinkedIn, feel free to request a friend or link – I’d love to create a Civil War “community” using the social media out there.

It’s two days until Juneteenth, do you know what your state/community is doing?

Although Donald has already commented on their going away, I felt I needed to also.

One of the things Donald and I have a very hard time in doing is self promotion. You wouldn’t know it by our subliminal advertising for The Civil War Research Guide (still the best guide ever written) but it’s true.

I once chastised Donald for commenting on other blogs without mentioning our blog. In classic Tom style, I proceeded to do the exact same thing. We could be doing a bunch of stuff that would make the site more known in the blogosphere but I tend to be too lazy. So instead we have relied heavily on the fine folks at CWI to do it for us.

I’ll be honest that there were several times that I would eagerly await their weekly review. When they were kind enough to review us in a North and South article on Civil War blogs, I was on cloud nine – we had taken our slightly (maybe more than slightly) skewed look at the war and made it to the big time. Of course sometimes we didn’t agree with what they thought of our world but they were always kind and pretty funny.

I will miss them greatly. I can only hope they will be able to find a way to restart the reviews at a later date.

So from the bottom of my heart, thank you for all of the great work you did not just for Touch the Elbow but for the entire Civil War blogosphere.

Congratulations to the New York Giants and to all their fans. Well played. Well done. Well deserved.

The building that I work in houses a lot of Redskins fans, which is understandable given they’re the local Pro Football team, but the Cowboys aren’t lacking support either. There’s a sprinkling of Steelers loyalists, but surprisingly few Ravens fans considering a lot of people live in Maryland and Baltimore is a relatively short stop and go, stop and go, mass of fused bumpers away. In good times you’ll hear lone voices admit they like the Eagles or Bears. Bills’ fans only seem to emerge from hibernation when it’s freezing or the D.C. area is getting hammered by a snowstorm. Raider fans appear to emulate nature too. They wait for a full moon.

There are two, and only two, die-hard Patriot fans in the place. Warren and me. Whereas I worried about the Chargers, Cowboys, Colts, Ravens, Steelers, and Giants going into those games, Warren was cool under fire the whole season. The more he told me not to worry, the more worried I got.

Hasan is a dyed in the wool Giants’ fan, having grown up in NYC. We’ve been going at each other for the last two weeks, all in good fun. I’m so confident of a victory by the Pats in the Super Bowl I promised I’d buy him whatever DVD comes on the market trumpeting an upset win. I’m so confident I told him I would not allow him to reciprocate with a Patriots DVD. Candy. Baby. Some limb I climbed out on. You catch my drift.

This game is both historic and momentous for the Patriots. The biggest game of each individual player’s life. If I were Bill Belichick I’d use the same exact words to my players that Herb Brooks directed toward the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team before the start of the Third Period, when they were down 2-1 to Finland. “If you lose this game, you’ll take it to your f---ing grave! Your f---ing grave!”

Now for my prediction: the game will be over after the first quarter. Think I’m kidding? I picked the Patriots to beat the Redskins 56-3 this season, and I have a witness.

Not sure if you have seen this commercial for HP or not but it says something that hits home, it can be downright hard to be inspired.

So yes I have gone for a bit - but worse, I’ve actually written posts while never putting them up – just didn’t feel like they were right for the time. Now, I’m starting to feel like writing again, so I will.

It has been nice to see several welcome backs from our various blogging friends, it is good to know when one is missed.

Today, I leave you with something humorous – tomorrow or the Monday something that I am sure will cause a stir.

A stir is exactly what we need to welcome us back - nothing like coming back with a vengeance.

Tom’s humorous (at least to him) tale of building a house. Part One

I am building a house. I thought it would be a short, easy process, I was a bit off.

Almost five months ago I closed on my lot. I was told within two months ground would be broken. The builder was a bit off, it took four months.

A few weeks ago, I made my weekly pilgrimage to my lot, expecting to see nothing but dirt but was pleasantly surprised to see something else.

Now, one of the nice things the Builder does is put a sign up saying who is building the house and for what wonderful family it is being built for. And that day my sign was up. So I decided to take a picture.

This is the picture of my sign.


Here is a picture of my sign and the surrounding area.


The only thing I could think of was that I hope this wasn’t a “sign” of how bad things would be during the process. Feel free to insert your own bathroom humor here.

To be fair, the builder did move the Port-a-Potty a bit away from the sign. They have also made good progress over the last few weeks, with the foundation and cement block garage walls (that the house will sit on) already up.

See you soon and bring your pitchfork when you come back. For those of you that went to school in South Carolina, the previous statement is a hint of things to come….