Time Capsule Tuesday

 

Tonight we are going to visit what was happening in the world on the wedding date of my 2nd great-grandparents.

William Robert Harrell (1838-1908) and Catherine M. Odom (1841-1875) were married in Johnson County, Georgia on Thursday, December 21, 1865.  

Of course, the biggest thing that happened in 1865 was the ending of the American Civil War with the surrender of the Confederate States, beginning the Reconstruction era of U.S. History.  The war mainly ended on April 9 when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.  By December, there was still a lot of clean up, so to speak, happening in the wake of the war ending.  

It was an eventful and dark year, kind of like 2020 has been.  Five days after Lee surrendered, President Abraham Linda was shot while attending a performance at the Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.  He died the next day.  On April 26, his assassin is cornered and fatally shot by a member of the Union cavalry.  In May, the first train robbery in the U.S. occurred in North Bend, Ohio (a suburb of Cincinnati).  In June, there are still more Confederate surrenders, and June 19, 1865 becomes the day officially celebrated in modern times each year as Juneteenth.  

On July 5, the U.S. Secret Service was founded.  On July 7, four of the conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination are hanged.  Also this month, Wild Bill Hickok is involved in a shootout in Springfield, Missouri, in what is regarded as the first true western "fast draw" showdown.  He shot and killed Little Dave Tutt over a poker debt.  

Meanwhile, there are two steamboats that sink, killing more than 1,800 people.  There is an earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area that is a high intensity.  The last significantly organized Confederate unit finally surrendered on November 6.  Captain Henry Wirz, Confederate superintendent of Andersonville Prison is hanged for war crimes arising from the treatment of prisoners of war and conditions at the prison.  

And that brings us to December 1865:

Top Headlines:

December 11 - The U.S. Congress creates the House Appropriations Committee.

December 18 - The 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime, is declared ratified by three-quarters of the states.

December 21 - The Kappa Alpha Order, a social fraternity, is founded at Washington and Lee University.

December 24 - The Ku Klux Klan is formed by six Confederate Army veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, to resist Reconstruction and intimidate "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags", as well as to repress the freed slaves. 

December 26 - James H. Mason of Massachusetts patents the first U.S. coffee percolator.  

The U.S. president is Andrew Johnson.  He was the third president of that year.  There was no vice president in office at the end of 1865.

Famous people born on December 21:

1117:  Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury

1897:  Joseph Stalin, Russian dictator

1908:  Pat Weaver, Los Angeles, California, TV Executive, started the Today show

Hot New Toys in 1865:

Cap Guns

And in the midst of all that, two people fell in love and got married.  Catherine already had one child whose father (her husband) was killed in the War.  She and Robert had 3 children before she tragically died so young.  I am descended from their oldest child, Emma Vermell Harrell, my great-grandmother.