Reflections of An Uncommon Common Man

I had a little bird Its name was Enza I opened a window And in-flu-enza.   A worldwide influenza pandemic broke out in 1918 just as U.S. troops were landing in Europe to fight in World War I. To prevent panic, allied governments censored reports about the "Spanish Flu" and military death records often cited pneumonia as the cause of death. The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 killed 25-40 million people on all seven continents and has been described as "the greatest medical holocaust in history." The Medieval plagues such as the Black Death were probably worse but there was no accurate record keeping then. Some estimates are as many as 100 million people died worldwide from the Spanish Flu and 500 million contracted the disease. The population of the world at the time was around 1.8 billion people. Compare that with todays population of almost 8 billion. Close to 700,000 American's died of the disease. To put that into perspective America lost 75...

  John Overton (April 9, 1766 – April 12, 1833) was an advisor of Andrew Jackson, a judge at the Superior Court of Tennessee, a banker and political leader. Overton was born in Louisa County, Virginia. His parents were James Overton and MaryWaller; his father was a great-grandson of Robert Overton, the Parliamentarian military commander during the English Civil War (and friend of Marvell and Milton). In 1787 he began his law career and moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1789, to practice law at the Davidson County court. Overton was elected to succeed his friend Andrew Jackson as a member of the Superior Court of Tennessee in 1804, where he served as a judge until 1810. His elder brother Thomas Overton served as Jackson's second in his duel with Charles Dickinson. In 1819, Overton founded Memphis, Tennessee on land he owned with Andrew Jackson and James Winchester. Overton Park in Memphis is named for him. He was also Andrew Jackson's presidential campaign manager. On April 12...

  There were probably Black Confederate soldiers contrary to the belief of many noted scholars in academia. I don't believe that there were very many compared to the blacks who served in the Union Army. There are estimates of maybe three thousand that served as rebels as opposed to nearly 200,000 that served as Yankees. For scholars to discount the idea that blacks would serve the South is misguided I believe. In my mind they are just as wrong as those white Southerners who refuse to acknowledge that slavery was the underlining cause of the Civil War. Many Southerners overestimate the numbers of Blacks that served as rebels because in their mind slavery had nothing to do with the war. It was all about states rights or the tariff issue. These other issues influenced the causes of the war but if there had been no slaves there would have been no war in my view. The evidence is overwhelming.  It is on the same level of someone denying the holocaust in spite of the overwhelm...

  Believe it or not there were over 5,000 black slave owners in the United States during the antebellum period. Their reasons for owning slaves were varied but many if not most owned them for the same reason that white people owned them. Economic advantage. However there were some that had slaves so as to protect them from white slave owners. Somewhat like black Oscar Schindler's. It has been claimed that most black slave owners were mulatto or bi-racial. Mulatto was an antebellum term. They were usually the children of white slave owners. The largest and wealthiest black slave owner in Tennessee was Sherrod Bryant. It is safe to say that most blacks and whites are not aware of this. Bryant’s land holdings were primarily in two locations, where the Schermerhorn Symphony Center is today in Davidson County and in Rutherford and Wilson Counties in what is now Long Hunter State Park.   According to Dan Whittle, president of Friends of Long Hunter, “Sherrod Bryant was b...

  There are two graves outside of the Hazen Brigade monument at Stones River. One of them belongs to William Holland. His name was Harlan but when he joined the army they recorded his last name as Holland and he apparently kept that name the rest of his life. The other William Harlan who I had the pleasure of meeting in the 1970's, was the grandson of William Holland and he served in World War I. I asked William one day if I could hunt Civil War relics on his property. He told me the story of how he had found relics by the bushel when he was a kid. William used minie balls as fishing sinkers. The following is the story of William Harlan's grandfather William Holland. Like many Civil War soldiers, William Holland left very few records about his life. What we know about him comes from his government pension file, which is enough to tell his story with some details. By his own account, William Holland was born a slave near Haydensville, Todd County, Kentucky in the mid-1820s...

  Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a black boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois, visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam arrived at Till's great-uncle's house where they took Till, transported him to a barn, beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was discovered and retrieved from the river three days later. Till was returned to Chicago and his mother, who had raised him mostly by herself, insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the ...

Theodore Roosevelt   Three and a half years after he left office in March 1909, Roosevelt was running for President as a member of the Progressive Party or it was popularly known as the (Bull Moose Party). Before a campaign speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, John F. Schrank, a saloon-keeper from New York who had been stalking him for weeks, shot Roosevelt once in the chest with a .38 caliber revolver. The 50-page text of his campaign speech folded over twice in Roosevelt's breast pocket and a metal glasses case slowed the bullet, saving his life. Schrank was immediately disarmed, captured and may have been lynched had Roosevelt not shouted for Schrank to remain unharmed. Correctly determining that he was not mortally wounded, Roosevelt went on with his scheduled speech despite the protests of his staff. He spoke for about 90 minutes, at one point showing his bloodied shirt to the crowd and remarking that "It takes more than that to kill a bull moose." After the speech, ...