Yes. Within the span of a few days in April 1861, Lee was offered command of both the Union and Confederate forces.
Although he opposed slavery and secession and believed the South could not win, his loyalty to his home state of Virginia led him to accept the Confederate command.
No number of Supreme Court justices is specified in the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court began with six justices, rose to a peak of ten during the Lincoln years, and settled at nine in 1869.
The 1793 invention, the cotton gin, by Eli Whitney mechanically removed seeds from a cotton bloom without harming its fiber. Previously, seeds had to be removed laboriously by hand. The invention led to an economic boom for the South by increasing the amount of cotton the southern states could provide to textile manufacturers. It also…
The first American land visited by Columbus was an island in the Bahamas that he named San Salvador. Historians have disagreed which island this really was. Wading Island and Samana Cay have both been suggested as possibilities. The landfall was first spotted on October 12, 1492, at about 2 A.M. by Rodrigo de Triana, the…
The fire that killed 491 people at the Boston night club The Coconut Grove on November 28, 1942, may have been started by a 16-year-old boy named Stanley Tomaszewski who lit a match near a palm tree while trying to replace a light bulb. However, the fire commissioner could not prove that the boy had…
Yes, the U.S. has attacked Canada. The U.S. attempted to conquer Canada, then a British colony, in 1813, during the War of 1812. American forces got as far as burning the city of York (now Toronto) before being turned back. In retribution, the British burned much of Washington, D.C., the following year.
In 1846, the 29-year-old Henry David Thoreau was charged with nonpayment of a poll tax. Thoreau refused to pay because the tax was to be spent on the Mexican War, which he opposed. Thoreau’s friends paid the tax for him, after he spent the night of July 23, 1846, in jail. He described the experience…