FUN FACTS WEDNESDAY!

Hi everyone!  This is being posted a bit later than usual, but as usual, life has been hectic and I'm a bit behind. 

After writing on Brunswick, I became in interested in Maine's participation of the American Civil War.  For all you historians, this might be a bit boring, but for all the rest of you, hopefully you will find this as interesting as I have! 

Here's what I found:

While no land battles were fought in Maine, Maine was a large supplier of military manpower, supplies, ships, arms, and political support for the Union Army. Maine was the first state in the northeast to be aligned with the new Republican Party, partly due to the influence of evangelical Protestantism, and partly to the fact that Maine was a frontier state, and thus receptive to the party's "free soil" platform.

SIDE NOTE:  I was really surprised to read that, being that present day Maine is considered to be very liberal.  While there is a very liberal group here, we have been very surprised at the number of Christian believers we have met and the large amount of Republican bumper stickers and signs supporting the Republican Party.   Ok, back to the facts!

Abraham Lincoln chose Maine's Hannibal Hamlin as his first Vice President.

Maine was so eager for the cause that it ended up contributing a larger number of combatants, in proportion to its population, than any other Union state.^[2] It was second only to Massachusetts in the number of its sailors who served in the Union Navy. Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain (later a major general and Bowdoin's College President here in Brunswick! and Maine's Governor) and the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment played a key role at the Battle of Gettysburg, and the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery Regiment lost more men in a single charge (during the Siege of Petersburg) than any Union regiment in the war.

Another noteworthy Mainer was Augusta newspaperman and U.S. Congressman James G. Blaine.  Blaine was a powerful voice on Capitol Hill and dominated post-war politics during the Reconstruction period. The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was substantially Blaine's proposition, and later he was the 1884 Republican nominee for President.

There is so much more information on Maine and it's contribution to the Civil War that I would need to write a book!  LOL, I'm pretty sure that's already been done!  So, for the sake of being a blog, that's it for today. I hope you all enjoyed the information!

Of course, Happy Birthday today to my darling first granddaughter, Alex!!