1864
Fall of Nanjing
After an eleven-year siege during which the Heavenly Kingdom's capital had become a hunger-haunted shell, Qing forces under Zeng Guofan stormed Nanjing. Hong Xiuquan was already dead, probably of poisoning. Thousands were massacred in the aftermath. The Taiping Rebellion was effectively over; twenty million or more had perished in it.
Sherman's March to the Sea
After burning Atlanta, William Tecumseh Sherman cut his army loose from its supply lines and marched sixty thousand men through three hundred miles of Georgia, eating as they went. "War is cruelty," he wrote, "and you cannot refine it." He took Savannah at Christmas and presented it to Lincoln as a gift.
First International Founded
In St. Martin's Hall in London, a meeting of British trade unionists and French socialists founded the International Workingmen's Association - later known as the First International. Karl Marx drafted the inaugural address. For ten years it would be the main organizational vehicle of European socialism, before it tore itself apart over Bakunin's anarchists.
First Geneva Convention
At a Swiss conference inspired by Dunant's book on Solferino, twelve European states signed a convention guaranteeing the neutrality of military medical personnel and the wounded. A red cross on a white flag - the Swiss flag reversed - became the symbol. Modern international humanitarian law had been written, for the first time, on paper.
Sand Creek Massacre
At dawn, Colonel John Chivington's Colorado cavalry attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camp flying an American flag over the chief's lodge. They killed between 150 and 200, most of them women and children, and mutilated the bodies. The army investigated and condemned it. Nobody was punished. The Plains Indian wars entered a new, crueler decade.
Arlington Cemetery Founded
Out of grudge as much as planning, the Union started burying its dead in the front yard of Robert E. Lee's confiscated Virginia estate. The general's rose garden became a field of graves. By the end of the war, thirteen thousand lay there. A century later, a Kennedy would join them, and it would be sacred ground.