Charles Carleton Coffin: War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman

Steeped in the ancestral lore of New England, a student of the origins of this country, a reader of, and thinker upon, the records of the past, having seen history in its making...

Thus, amid happy surroundings, in the new home, in the last leap-year of this wonderful century, came the time of the golden wedding. God had walked with these, his children, fi...

When the long gathering clouds broke in the storm at Sumter, and war was precipitated in a rain of blood, Charles Carleton Coffin's first question was as to his duty. He was thi...

Shawmut Church, in Boston, stands at the corner of Tremont and Brookline Streets. Its history is one of unique interest. Its very name connects the old and new world together. A...

After four years of strenuous activity of body and brain, it was not easy for Carleton to settle down at once to commonplace routine. Having exerted every nerve and feeling in s...

One can hardly imagine a better school for the training of a good American citizen than that which Carleton enjoyed. By inheritance and birth in a New Hampshire village, he knew...

"In 1836 my father, catching the speculation fever of the period, accompanied by my uncle and brother-in-law, went to Illinois, and left quite an amount of money for the purchas...

The story of the Wilderness campaign, during which were fought the greatest musketry battles in the history of the world, with their awful slaughter, has been told by hundreds o...

At Penang, in the Spice Islands, the verge of the Flowery Kingdom seemed to have been reached. "We might say that that land had bloomed over its own borders, and its blossoms ha...

The opening of the battle-summer of 1862 found the seat of war in the East, in the tidewater region of Virginia. These were the days when "strategy" was the word. General George...

While Carleton enjoyed that kind of work, ethical, literary, benevolent, and political, which appealed to sentiment and aroused sympathy to the burning point, he was an equally...

Carleton's biographer having resigned the pastorate of Shawmut Church at the end of 1892, the work was continued by the Rev. William E. Barton, who had been called from Wellingt...

The time had now come for the formation of a new political party, and in this Carleton had a hand, being at the first meeting and making the acquaintance of the leading men, Hen...

Carleton's account of the battle of Bull Run, where the Union forces first won the day, and then lost it through a panic, was so graphic, accurate, and comprehensive, that the r...

Besides other means of recreation, Carleton was happy in having been from childhood a lover of music. In earlier life he sang in the church choir, under the training of masters...

His first letter from the Army of the West, he dated, Cincinnati, December 28, 1861. Instead of a comparatively circumscribed Utica (on the Potomac), to confine his powers, our...

The Coffins of America are descended from Tristram Coffin of England and Nantucket. Charles Carleton Coffin was born of Revolutionary sires. He first saw light in the southwest...

After the exhausting Gettysburg campaign, Carleton was obliged to rest some weeks. So far as his letter-book shows, he did not engage in war correspondence again until the openi...

The modern age of electricity was ushered in during Mr. Coffin's early manhood. The telegraph, which has given the world a new nervous system, being less an invention than an ev...

Carleton's memories of school-days have little perhaps that is uncommon. He remembers the typical struggle between the teacher and the big boy who, despite resistance, was sound...

It was "blowing great guns," and the sea was white with foam, when on the ninety-eighth anniversary of Washington's birthday into another world, December 14th, 1867, the steamer...

When Lee and his army, leaving the front of the Union army and becoming invisible, when President and people, general and chief and privates, Cabinet officers and correspondents...

Carleton was a typical free churchman. He was not only so by inheritance and environment, but because he was master of the New Testament. His penetrating acumen and power to rea...

It was one of the great disappointments of Carleton's life that, on returning from his journey around the world, he was not made, as he had with good reason fully expected to be...

After five letters from Washington, in the first of which he had predicted that in a few days, for the first time in war, there would be the great contest between ironclads and...

By this time, Mr. Coffin was himself nearly exhausted, having been worn down by constant service, day and night, in one of the most exhausting campaigns on record. Knowing that...

It was a remarkable coincidence that Mr. Coffin was to exchange worlds and transfer his work in the very year in which the issues of the Civil War were to be eliminated from nat...

Whither now should Carleton go? There were but few fields to conquer, for the slaveholders' rebellion was swiftly nearing its end, and Carleton felt his work with armies and ami...