God Knows All Your Names: Stories in American History

God Knows All Your Names: Stories in American History

by Paul N. Herbert
God Knows All Your Names: Stories in American History

God Knows All Your Names: Stories in American History

by Paul N. Herbert

eBookHistory / General (History / General)

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Overview

      


People with only a slight interest in history will enjoy these fascinating, short and easy to understand stories.  Serious history buffs will like these lesser-known episodes, not the stories we’ve heard a million times. For example: try to find anyone who knows about the attempted slave insurrection in Fairfax County, Virginia.

With Mary Lincoln’s spending habits, who knew that Abraham Lincoln actually saved an enormous percentage of his  presidential salary?  A slave honored in Virginia with a monument;  the history of Lee Highway which ‘opened’ with great fanfare in 1923 as a 3,000 mile road from Washington, DC to San Diego; a story about the Little River Turnpike, the second oldest turnpike in America, built partly by slaves and captured Hessian soldiers. 

You’ll read about two Civil War ships that collided in the Potomac River.  Victims included wounded soldiers' wives and one soldier’s six-year-old son.  You’ll read a great account of the massive Civil War corruption. 

You’ll learn about the disastrous condition of the treasury (sound familiar?) during the Revolutionary War.  The government tried everything, including a lottery to get the country afloat in a sea of red ink.  But the most fascinating story may be about the Revolutionary War soldier who faked his own desertion to defect to the enemy with the highly secretive mission of going behind enemy lines to capture and return for trial the worst traitor in American history: Benedict Arnold.  Bet you never heard of this story.

There are many other stories in this eclectic, heavily-researched  manuscript. There’s a story about the Christmas Truce in World War One, about long-forgotten holidays in Virginia,  about the retrocession which sent an area of Washington back to Virginia in 1846, and about the impeachment of a Supreme Court justice (it happened only once).

And more!

 



Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781452016344
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Publication date: 08/18/2009
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 522 KB

About the Author

The author is a retired federal criminal investigator who now has the time to pursue those things (like reading and writing) that previously were enjoyed on a limited basis.
The author urges people to buy the book because they will love the informative, interesting and well-wriitten stories. But whether you buy the book or not, the author has one request for everyone reading this: turn your television sets off! It is garbage that is taking up time that you could and should be using to read or write or do anything more constructive. Less TV; more books!

Read an Excerpt

"Christopher Ludwick must have been very disturbed to see German-speaking soldiers from his ancestral homeland fighting against German-speaking Americans. There were two ways to skin a panther, or in this case, lessen the leased Hessian forces: defeat them or entice them to desert from the army, move to the peaceful Pennsylvania countryside and start a new life. While General Washington struggled with the former, the baker-general deftly handled the latter.
The skilled propagandist named Ludwick convinced numerous Hessian prisoners of war to desert from the army and take up residence among a welcoming German community only a few miles away. 'Farm, don't fight' would have been the bumper sticker, if they had such a thing. How many he persuaded will never be known, but it worked. It worked for the reason Ludwick explained to the Continental Congress: "The many Hessians . . . are so well pleased with this country . . . that at all events they would rather prefer to settle here than to return to the dreary abodes of bondage from whence they came."
In addition to the POWs, the audacious Ludwick, posing as a deserter, snuck into the Hessian Camp at Staten Island and made the same quality of life spiel. Pennsylvania offered, according to one historian, "a complete farm except for the frau." Sometimes, as shown in one Hessian's diary, the product sold itself: "America is a wonderful land, where the industrious hand of the worker never goes unrewarded, and those who work never want." This particular soldier seemed surprised with early American recreation: "The Americans, from their youth on, participate in vigorous body exercise, and when nothing else is to be done, they hit aball."
In July 1776, Pennsylvania started hiring Hessian POWs to make ammunition. A month later, the federal government formed a committee to "encourage Hessians . . . to quit [their] iniquitous service." Rewards would be offered to those who "choose to accept lands, liberty, safety, and a communion of good laws and mild government in a country where many of their friends and relations are already happily settled, rather than continue exposed to the toils and dangers of a long and bloody war." By 1778, the Americanization of Hessians was at full boil: the government offered 50 acres for any Hessian to desert. The pot was sweetened for captains who brought 40 Hessians with him: 800 acres, four oxen, one bull and two cows.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of our nation's Founding Fathers, praised Ludwick for showing the Hessians "the difference between the privileges and manner of life of an American freeman and those of a Hessian slave," and for providing "the most captivating descriptions of the affluence and independence of their former countrymen in the German counties of Pennsylvania." George Washington believed that well-treated Hessian POWs, "so fraught with a love of liberty," who were returned to the enemy would "create a disgust to the service among the remainder of the foreign troops and widen that breach which is already opened between them and the British."
In May 1777, Ludwick was appointed superintendent of bakers. American soldiers were generally allotted ¾ to 1 ' pounds of flour daily. Sometimes they baked their own bread, commonly known as fire cakes: "the [flour] mixed with cold water, then daubed upon a flat stone and scorched on one side." Often, however, they traded their flour for rum or bread, "hard enough to break the teeth of a rat" according to one soldier."

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