What was going on in 1854

Hundreds of Irishwomen also travelled to the Crimea and their experiences have not been the subject of sustained research. They washed and cooked for the men and, after each battle, helped with the wounded. Indeed, it could be argued that the army wives were used to help redress the deficiencies in the support and medical services. Margaret Kirwin, the wife of Private John Kirwin of the 19th Foot, later described her experiences after landing at Varna:.

We marched on up to Devna and remained for a fortnight. There I bought a little wash tub, and carried my cooking things in it. This was the whole of my baggage which I carried on my head during the march. I also had a water bottle and a haversack to carry biscuits in.

The priest and minister had to carry their own bottles and sacks, like the soldiers. On the march the men kept falling out from the heat and they kept me busy giving them drinks. When we got to Monastne the [washing] duty of No. I stood in the midst of the stream from 6 am to 7 pm washing.

The Colour Sergeant would not keep account and some men paid and some did not, so that I was left with very little for my trouble. The Crimean War was also significant as it was the first conflict to be covered by war correspondents, the most prominent being the Dublin-born William Howard Russell. The war is unique in the history of war-reporting as the correspondents operated without the restrictions imposed by any form of censorship.

It was not until late in the war that the military commanders in the Crimea began to censor their despatches, and never again would war correspondents enjoy such freedom. In a despatch of September he wrote:. The management is infamous and the contrast offered by our proceedings to the conduct of the French most painful. Could you believe it: the sick have not a bed to lie upon? They are landed and thrown into a rickety hut without a chair or a table in it. The French with their ambulances, excellent commissariat staff and boulangerie etc.

While these things go on, Sir George Brown only seems anxious about the men being clean-shaved, their necks well stiffened and waist belts tight. Only a small number of war correspondents worked in the Crimea, and it is interesting to note that there were two other Irishmen among them—Edwin Lawrence Godkin, born at Moyne, Co. In view of this high level of Irish involvement in the Crimea, in both the military and civilian capacities, the intense interest of the Irish public in the war is perhaps less surprising.

Many families must have had members in the Crimea serving in some capacity. The work of war correspondents such as William Howard Russell fed this public demand for information, and the large number of Crimean War ballads in Irish collections is a further manifestation of this interest.

When the south side of Sevastapol was captured in September a series of celebrations took place around the country, and these were repeated when an armistice was signed in Paris in February A vast amount of food and drink was consumed, including hams, legs of mutton, meat pies, venison pasties, rice puddings, plum puddings, turkeys, geese, joints of beef, capons and chickens, and two-pound loaves.

The war, which claimed an estimated , lives , pitted Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia against Russia, whose ruler, Czar Nicholas I, was attempting to expand his influence over the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean at the expense of the declining Ottoman Empire. The spark that set off the war was religious tension between Catholics and the Orthodox believers, including Russians, over access to Jerusalem and other places under Turkish rule that were considered sacred by both Christian sects.

After violence in Bethlehem in which Orthodox monks were killed, Nicholas sent an emissary to the Turkish sultan, Abdulmecid I , and demanded not only equal access to religious sites but that the sultan recognize Nicholas as protector of Orthodox Christians throughout the Ottoman empire, as British journalist and author A.

Wilson has written. That horrible slaughter helped inflame western European public opinion against the Russians. In mid-September , the allies landed 30, French soldiers, 26, British troops and 4, Turks at Eupatoria , a town on the Crimean peninsula.

More than 5, Russian soldiers were killed, while the British and French lost men, according to the Lancashire Infantry Museum. The Allies then headed to Sevastopol for what they expected to be a three-month siege. Instead, the fighting ended up dragging on for nearly a year.

Early on, the Russians tried to break through British lines and capture an allied base at Balaklava, a harbor that was crucial to supplying the allied operation. The British were compelled to divert some of their forces to go on defense. The Heavy Brigade, a force of British cavalrymen, then pursued the Russians, throwing them into disarray.

But that success was overshadowed by the British blunder that followed. To prevent the Russians from moving captured artillery, British Field Marshal Lord Raglan ordered another cavalry unit, the Light Brigade, to go in and seize them. But one of his officers, George Bingham, the earl of Lucan , became confused about which guns Raglan was talking about.

In desperation, the Russians tried another surprise attack in November, but again failed. The Battle of Inkerman was fought in the terrifying confusion of a thick fog, which forced small groups of British soldiers to advance blindly toward gunfire and fight the Russians wherever they found them.

Ultimately, the Russians retreated, but not before leaving behind 12, dead, while the British lost 2, men and the French 1, But the allies faced other obstacles besides the Russians. The besieged Russians suffered too, and eventually their resolve gave out. A few days later, the Russians burned their remaining ships in Sevastopol and withdrew from the city. When the class has formed predictions about the order of the documents, open up the first document in chronological sequence — the Compromise of — to view the document in more detail.

Engage in a full-class demonstration of how to analyze a primary source document. Ask students to identify the date and author s of the document.

Students should read the document details to discover for whom the document was written and why it was created. Use the date of the document, its content, and other resources if necessary to put the aim and impact of Clay's idea for compromise into plain language. Once the class has practiced document analysis with the Compromise of , explain that students should give each document they look at the same careful consideration before attempting to sequence the documents. Read and examine each document and put the documents in the correct sequence as a class or in pairs or individually.

When students have sequenced all of the documents, compare their earlier predictions with the correct sequence. Ask a series of questions to debrief the content: Were there any surprises?

What did you learn that you did not previously realize about the period to ? Do the events referred to in these documents that do not seem to be directly related to the Civil War relate to that conflict in some indirect way?

How would you characterize the U. Government from to ? How would you characterize this period in U. For more information about the featured documents, follow the links below. Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v.