General Mad Anthony Wayne and the Attack On Stony Point, American Revolution

 

A musket ball grazed Anthony Wayne’s skull. Blood ran down his forehead. Around him, American soldiers pushed uphill through broken timber and musket fire.

Their muskets were empty. They couldn’t shoot back, and stopping to load would leave them under British fire. They had to shove through the sharpened branches and claw their way uphill to the men shooting at them.

It was just past midnight on July 16, 1779. About 1,300 Americans were going after Stony Point. They’d slipped through the marshes without a sound, but now the British were firing and men were falling.

Six weeks earlier, the British had seized Stony Point and the landing across the river at Verplanck’s Point. Between them lay King’s Ferry, a busy crossing that helped carry American supplies and travelers between New England and the states farther south. British troops now stood across that route.

Sir Henry Clinton, Britain’s commander-in-chief in America, wanted Washington to fight for it. If the ferry wasn’t enough of a temptation, British troops threatening the Hudson Highlands might do the trick. Clinton needed Washington somewhere he could strike him.

General Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan To End Civil War

 

General Winfield Scott (Harper's New Monthly Magazine. 1861)

Lieutenant General Winfield Scott was better known to his men as “old fuss n feathers,” and the name fit him perfectly. Scott was as close as the Americans had to a genuine hero. He had fought with distinction in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. In 1832, he completed the treaty ending the Black Hawk War that purchased six million acres from the Sac and Fox nations. Scott enforced Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policy during that same decade and removed the remainder of the Five Civilized Tribes to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. No American military commander other than George Washington had accomplished so much.

 

Winfield Scott was a corpulent, seventy-three-year-old worrywart when the Civil War rolled around. Everything had to be just so for the old general. So he planned everything down to the last detail and prepared for every contingency.

 

When Abraham Lincoln asked Scott to draw up a plan for the war, he created the Anaconda Plan. Like the slithery South American serpent, it would wrap its coils around the Confederacy and slowly strangle it into submission.

 

The Anaconda Plan combined a blockade of Southern ports by the navy and a joint army and navy campaign down the Mississippi, and then to control New Orleans and the Mississippi River. Its object was to split the Confederacy in half and squeeze them like an Anaconda snake.

Philo Farnsworth Changed American Life

 

Whimsical illustration of Philo Farnsworth at work in his laboratory

“The damned thing works!”

 

That was the message Philo Farnsworth sent his backer after getting his television working in September 1927, according to an account published by the Indiana Historical Bureau. The picture was a straight line. After all the trouble it had taken to get it, a straight line was plenty.

 

Philo was 21. He’d been building equipment in a San Francisco laboratory, trying to make pictures travel electronically. His wife, Pem, helped with the work. Her brother, Cliff Gardner, learned glassblowing because the tubes Philo needed weren’t sitting on a hardware store shelf.

 

Getting somebody to pay for this took some explaining.

 

When fundraiser George Everson pitched the project to banker James Fagan, the banker answered, “Well, that is a damn fool idea, but somebody ought to put money into it.”

 

A group connected with Crocker First National Bank put up $25,000. Philo had money to work with—and people who’d eventually want it back.

 

He’d been thinking about television since he was a kid. Born in Utah in 1906, he’d read science magazines and fooled with electrical equipment. His wife said looking at rows in a field helped him picture how television could work.

Extracting the Caimanera Mines Guantanamo Bay Spanish American War

Sailors dragging water for mines

(Most of this article is based on official Naval Records and “Lifting the Caimanera Mines,” an article by Arthur H. Dutton in The Overland Monthly Magazine, July 1904. The illustrations are adopted from photos published in the Dutton article. The infographic on the mine is original.)

The Texas had already hit a mine. So had the Marblehead, and both ships were still afloat.

 

That was the good news. The bad news was that nobody knew how many more mines were waiting under the water.

 

It was June 1898. American warships were pushing into Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay. They’d secured the lower harbor, but getting farther inland toward Caimanera meant crossing water the Spanish had turned into a floating ambush.

 

A mine didn’t need a gun crew or good aim. It just had to sit there until something expensive bumped into it.

 

The Texas and Marblehead had caught mines with their propellers during a bombardment on June 15. Somehow, they hadn’t gone off.

 

You could call that luck, but you couldn’t build a naval campaign around getting lucky twice.

Battle of Fort Donelson February 1862

General Ulysses S. Grant (Harper's New Monthly Magazine. July 1865)

Winter campaigns were never easy. The schizophrenic Tennessee weather hurled wind and rain at the troops all day, making it almost impossible to march or grab a foothold in the mud and yuck. Then, it would freeze after dark, and the soldier’s clothing would strangle them like prison armor.

F. F. Kiner, Chaplain of the 14th Iowa Infantry, marched from Fort Henry to Fort Donelson. He slept on the cold, wet ground on his first night at Fort Donelson. It rained all day, then froze up after dark. “Our blankets froze stiff around us,” said Kiner, “and when moved, would stand in any position we would put them in.”

One night after it snowed, Kiner thought that the boys looked like “chunks of old logs lying beneath the snow.”

Not much fighting occurred on the left wing that day, so the sharpshooters made a game of it. Whenever a rebel raised his head to see what was happening, “the deadly aim of a Yankee sharpshooter paid his respects to his secession friend by sending a bullet through his brain.”

On February 15, Kiner’s brigade received orders to charge the works immediately in front of them. When the time came, they raced up the steep, open hill with bayonets fixed on their muskets. Shot and shells burst all around them. Rebel muskets blasted away, knocking down many of the soldiers.

Four Photos Showing Life On The Battleship Maine Spanish American War

 

Crew of the Battleship Maine
(At the time this photo was taken, it is unsure how many of the 260 men pictured survived.)

Wright’s History of the Spanish American War (1898) published these photos of life on the Battleship Maine. Most were taken just days before the explosion. How many of the sailors pictured survived the blast is uncertain.

Torpedo tube and gunners on the Battleship Maine. All of them perished in the explosion.

General Joseph Wheeler From The Civil War To The Spanish American War

 

General Joseph Wheeler (Munsey's Magazine. 1898)

Joseph Wheeler’s infantrymen plunged into the slaughter at Shiloh in April 1862. Cannons boomed through the woods, musket fire ripped through the ranks, and the young colonel led the 19th Alabama into his first major battle. He’d started the war on foot, but he wouldn’t stay there.

Give Wheeler a horse, and things moved considerably faster.

He’d quit the U.S. Army in 1861 to join the Confederacy. By the end of 1862, he’d climbed to brigadier general and taken charge of cavalry, scouting ahead of Confederate columns and snapping at pursuing Union troops. “Fighting Joe” had found his work.

His riders struck wagon trains, tore up railroad tracks, and cut communications. While Confederate infantry trudged along muddy roads, Wheeler’s horsemen screened their movements and fought to keep Union cavalry away. When the army retreated, they stayed behind to buy it time.

But riding hard didn’t guarantee results. In 1864, Wheeler swept north to wreck William Tecumseh Sherman’s railroad supply line while Union forces pressed toward Atlanta. His men damaged tracks, but repair crews patched them up, and Sherman kept squeezing the city.

Wheeler couldn’t raid the Confederacy out of defeat. In 1865, the shooting stopped, and he eventually traded military orders for speeches in Congress.

Then, thirty-three years later, he put on U.S. Army blue.

At sixty-one, Wheeler volunteered to fight Spain. President William McKinley appointed him a major general of volunteers, and the former Confederate headed for Cuba commanding American cavalry—including regulars, Black Buffalo Soldiers, and Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

On June 24, 1898, his columns pushed toward Las Guasimas. Buffalo Soldiers hacked through brush; Spanish riflemen opened fire. The Americans fought forward until the Spanish rear guard withdrew toward Santiago.

A week later, illness couldn’t keep Wheeler away from the fighting at San Juan Heights. He went forward as his cavalrymen, fighting on foot, joined the assault. Afterward, he helped negotiate Santiago’s surrender.

The young officer who’d fought to break the United States apart had returned as a gray-bearded general fighting under its flag. Different coat, different enemy—and Fighting Joe still wouldn’t sit out a battle.