Post Master General Montgomery Blair
As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
In the prelude to the end of the Civil War, I wonder sometimes if Abraham Lincoln tried to commit Grey Suicide for his sins, or what was his psychological problems which manifested one July day when in the month of June, General Grant somehow lost 10,000 Confederate Soldiers under General Jubal Early, dispatched by General Robert E. Lee in one of the last gambits to try and influence the 1864 elections, by trying to capture Washington City.
The interesting part in this is the Federals has no idea this army was coming north for weeks, until it broke out into the Shenandoah. The Federals in small force held Early for a day at the crossing, but holding onto the cantankerous profane Jubal Early was like holding onto a Dust Devil.
Washington City as receiving refugees when Early appeared. It was the damnedest of sights, as the day revealed the scare into Lincoln lost as Rebs decided to loot the Blair's homes instead of attacking the fort before them, Grant's reinforcements arrived for the siege of Lee.
With Early out front, Lincoln spent the day being shot at by Confederate snipers. It was the first and last American President that was shot at by an enemy of the United States. It was also the first and last time that two American Officers informed their Commander and Chief that he either get off the wall or he would be arrested, and, "To get down you damn fool". Lincoln was amused and got off the wall, but continued to bob up and down looking at the fighting as bullets whizzed over his head.
There is a story in this though that a reality existed that a 13 year old deaf boy, a gardener who when the Rebs arrived at the Blair mansion, Ned Byrne picked up his employers rifle, and ran off into the woods.
The boy though was not hiding. He took it upon himself to shoot 6 Confederate snipers, actually doing more damage, to the Confederate Army than the President, Secretary of War, Secretary of the Army and the assembled defenders.
In the end, the Blair family of Maryland and Missouri, father a Democrat who helped elect Abraham Lincoln, a Union General, and the Post Master General, a sister married to a Naval Officer, had a handicapped boy who was a one man army, while the Union Army and government let the Confederates escape back to Dixie again.
I could not find a picture of this kid, so it rests there, in the words of his Mistress who wrote her Admiral husband, lamenting that this little boy had been responsible for so much carnage on his own. That carnage probably disrupted the Confederate snipers so their best did not get a good bead on Abraham Lincoln.
It would have been probably better if Lincoln had been shot then. Hannibal Hamlin of Maine would have been President and chances are Lincoln would have not adorned allot of things for being a damn fool committing Grey Suicide.
No coins, monuments or fictional eulogies for Ned Byrne though. Just forgotten to history.
Nuff Said.
agtG
