Creative History

  When thinking about the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg--the largest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere--most of us can easily conjure up images of row upon row of white headstones laid out in perfect symmetry.   Many of us, if we think about the battle at all, may think of Victorian Era martial monuments made out of granite or marble, or of brass cannon and wooden fences scattered across lush Pennsylvania farmland.  And of course all of us learned as elementary school students, and we are always reminded whenever Gettysburg is mentioned, of President Abraham Lincoln and his famous address which he gave on the site of the battle in November of 1863 only a mere four months after the guns had fallen silent. But there is a more grisly and horrific side to the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, aside from monuments, orderly cemeteries and Abraham Lincoln that few, if any of us, ever think about  today.  However, the horror of the after...

  By July of 1864 the Union Army’s assault on the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia though massive and determined, had ground to a complete and bloody halt. Tens of thousands of young American soldiers lay dead scattered across the fields and woodlands of northern Virginia.  A veritable state of siege, centered around the strategically important railroad town of Petersburg, had begun to settle in between the two opposing armies.  Public outcry in the north started calling Ulysses S. Grant -Commanding General of the Union Army of the Potomac-a drunkard and a butcher.  The press clamored for President Lincoln to fire or demote his erstwhile General. Sensing an opportunity, and seeking to capitalize on the bloody stalemate that was the American Civil War in July of 1864,  a Confederate Army composed of 10,000 elite troops led by the audacious and flamboyant General Jubal Early moved north towards Washington DC.  The Confederacy hoped to take the Un...

Located on Florida’s Gulf Coast only a few miles off of Interstate Highway 75 is a place called the Koreshan Historic Site.  The Koreshan Historic Site is part of the Sunshine State’s expansive and sprawling  Koreshan State Park, which is home to much of rural Florida’s flora and fauna and is  a sanctuary for the state’s many unique species of birds and reptiles. The Koreshan Historic Site and State Park are located within the town of Estero.  Estero sits directly in the middle of the Gulf Coast tourist Meccas of Naples to the south and Fort Myers to the north.  Today Estero is home to about 37,000 people and it first became a thriving community in the 1920’s when construction on Interstate Highway 75, linking the cities of Tampa and Miami, was completed. But, built in 1894 approximately three decades prior to the completion of Interstate Highway 75 is Estero’s most famous building-- the Koreshan Historic Site.  What is known today as the Koreshan Histo...

  Under a sweltering equatorial sun, shackled around the neck and chained one to another at the ankles, on August 7, 1860 over 900 enslaved Africans were forced aboard the slave ship Erie docked near the mouth of the Congo River in west Africa. The imprisoned human cargo that had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, mostly children and young women, were led onto the ship at gunpoint and under the watchful eye of a thirty-four year old American slave trader originally from Portland, Maine (quite a distance from what would become the Confederate States of America) named Nathaniel Gordon. Writing for Scribner’s Magazine over forty years later in 1900 when mentioning the infamous slave trader Nathaniel Gordon in his scholarly article entitled, “The Slave Trade in America” historian John R. Spears would say of Gordon’s cargo aboard the Erie that, “Only 172 were men and 182 were women…Gordon preferred to carry children because they could not rise up to avenge his cruelties.” And l...