1860s

Elizabeth Keckley rose from slave to the Lincoln White House thanks to her supreme skill as a dressmaker. Her autobiography provides one of the most powerful accounts of the First Family's personal lives.

As you might remember from Nathanial Hawthorne’s impressions of Washington, the D.C. area was full of soldiers during the Civil War. Luckily for us, we can actually read an account from one of the soldiers thanks to the diary of Maximilian Hartman. A German tailor, Hartman immigrated to the U.S. to live with his brother in Pennsylvania. While many others from the time period had lambasted the capital city as a backwater, Hartman was quite impressed.

In the summer of 1861 the Confederate States found themselves annoyed by the U.S.S. Pawnee, a gunboat that patrolled the Potomac and made it difficult for the southerners to receive supplies from northern sympathizers. Fortunately for the Confederates, Col. Richard Thomas Zarvona had a plan...

It is generally an accepted practice of militaries around the world to not tell the enemy what you plan to do. It’s also a good idea to avoid passing secrets to enemy spies, especially if you know they are enemy spies. Apparently, however, Union troops stationed in Herndon, Virginia didn’t get the memo. Either that or they were too mesmerized by local belle Laura Ratcliffe to think straight. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, visited Washington, D.C. in 1862, as the Capital was gearing up for war against the Confederacy. If you remember Hawthorne at all from school, you won’t be surprised to find he had a lot to say.

All we know for sure is that Stonewall Jackson's left arm was buried at Ellwood plantation in 1863. What has happened to it since is anyone's guess.

In 1865, Lewis Powell was tried and hanged along with three other conspirators for their roles in the Lincoln assassination. That should have been the end of the story, but his skull would later surface in an undertaker's collections, the Army Medical Museum, and the Smithsonian before being claimed and finally buried in Florida in 1994.

April 14^th, 1865 was a pretty bad day for a lot of people. President Lincoln was assassinated, Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone had their lives torn apart, and Secretary of State William H. Seward was brutally stabbed along with most of his family and a few bystanders. Oh, you hadn’t heard about that last one?

The events of April 14, 1865 at Ford's Theatre in Washington are well known. Actor John Wilkes Booth went into President Lincoln's box and shot him. The President was mortally wounded and died the next morning. What you may not know, however, is that there were others victimized that April night... and their story is haunting.

If you haven't seen it yet, make sure to check out the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington's online exhibit, "Jewish Life in Mr. Lincoln's City, 1861-1865." The exhibit provides an interesting look at Civil War Washington through the lens of the Jewish experience in our fair city.