Friday, September 7, 2018

Straight Out of Brooklyn


Major-General Henry Slocum occupies one of the less prominent plinths at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, although his substantial specific service to that city (as it then was) dates from after the Civil War. He was originally from upstate Delphi, near Syracuse.
Slocum's wartime service was in the east through Gettysburg. He later occupied Atlanta for William Tecumseh Sherman, celebrating his 37th birthday there on September 24, 1864. Slocum headed one wing of Sherman's army marching though Georgia and the Carolinas, and did most of its battle command in 1865.

A passenger steamboat was built in Brooklyn in 1891 and named after the general, who died in 1894. It caught fire and sank in New York's East River in 1904, with terrible loss of life. That event keeps coming up in the thoughts and words of Dubliners on "Bloomsday" -- in James Joyce's novel Ulysses.

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