1850 – Washington Navy Yard begins work on first castings for the Dahlgren guns.
1856 – Lawrence, Kansas, was captured and sacked by pro-slavery forces. The Sacking of Lawrence occurred when pro-slavery activists attacked and ransacked the town of Lawrence, Kansas, which had been founded by anti-slavery settlers to help ensure that Kansas would become a “free state”. The incident made worse the guerrilla war in Kansas Territory that became known as Bleeding Kansas.
1863 – Nathaniel Banks, commander of the Union Department of the Gulf, surrounds the Confederate stronghold at Port Hudson and attacks. Fortifications were built at Port Hudson in 1863 to protect New Orleans from a Union attack down the Mississippi River. On April 25, 1862, New Orleans had fallen into Union hands following an attack from the Gulf of Mexico by Admiral David Farragut. Still, Port Hudson was considered an important installation for the South since it was a significant threat to Federal ships on the Mississippi River. In 1863, the Union command began to focus attention on clearing the Mississippi of all Rebels. The major thrust of this effort was taking Vicksburg, Mississippi, the Confederate stronghold to the north of Port Hudson. In April, Ulysses S. Grant summoned Nathaniel Banks to participate in the campaign against Vicksburg. Banks wavered at first, preferring instead to wage an independent campaign against Confederates in Louisiana. But in May, he set out to take Port Hudson, then under the command of Franklin Gardner. Banks had some 30,000 troops under his command, while Gardner possessed a force of just 3,500. When Banks began to encircle Port Hudson, Gardner made some feeble attacks to drive him away. On May 21, Gardner received orders from Joseph Johnston, operating in Mississippi, to abandon the fort. But Gardner refused, and asked for reinforcements. This was a fatal mistake, and Banks soon had Gardner surrounded. For the next three weeks, Banks attempted to capture Port Hudson but failed each time. It was not until Vicksburg surrendered on July 4 that Gardner also surrendered.
1863 – Under Lieutenant Commander J. G. Walker, U.S.S. Baron De Kalb, Choctaw, Forest Rose, Linden, and Petrel pushed up the Yazoo River from Haynes’ Bluff to Yazoo City, Mississippi. As the gunboats approached the city, Commander Isaac N. Brown, CSN, who had commanded the heroic ram C.S.S. Arkansas the preceding summer, was forced to destroy three ”powerful steamers, rams and a “fine navy yard, with machine shops of all kinds, sawmills, blacksmith shops, etc. . . to prevent their capture. Porter noted that ”what he had begun our forces finished,” as the city was evacuated by the Southerners. The Confederate steamers destroyed were Mobile, Republic, and ”a monster, 310 feet long and 70 feet beam.” Had the latter been completed, ”she would have given us much trouble.” Porter’s prediction to Secretary Welles at the end of the expedition, though overly optimistic in terms of the time that would be required, was nonetheless a clear summary of the effect of the gunboats’ sweep up the Yazoo: ”It is a mere question of a few hours, and then, with the exception of Port Hudson (which will follow Vicksburg), the Mississippi will be open its entire length.”
1864 – Gen. David Hunter took command of Dept. of West Virginia.
1864 – Gunfire from ironclad steamer U.S.S. Atlanta, Acting Lieutenant Thomas J. Woodward, and U.S.S. Dawn, Acting Lieutenant John W. Simmons, dispersed Confederate cavalry attacking Fort Powhatan on the James River, Virginia. Dawn, a wooden steamer, remained above the fort during the night to prevent another attack.
1881 – In Washington, D.C., humanitarians Clara Barton and Adolphus Solomons found the American National Red Cross, an organization established to provide humanitarian aid to victims of wars and natural disasters in congruence with the International Red Cross. Barton, born in Massachusetts in 1821, worked with the sick and wounded during the American Civil War and became known as the “Angel of the Battlefield” for her tireless dedication. In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln commissioned her to search for lost prisoners of war, and with the extensive records she had compiled during the war she succeeded in identifying thousands of the Union dead at the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp. She was in Europe in 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and she went behind the German lines to work for the International Red Cross. In 1873, she returned to the United States, and four years later she organized an American branch of the International Red Cross. The American Red Cross received its first U.S. federal charter in 1900. Barton headed the organization into her 80s and died in 1912.
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