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Oh, Right: The North Fought, Too

The last living person who had seen Abraham Lincoln when his train stopped at Peekskill on Feb. 19, 1861, was Alida Hicks Hutchinson, who died in 1952.

An African-American child, she was 4 years old when Lincoln stopped and made a three-minute speech here as part of the 12-day, 1,900-mile, seven-state train trip that took him from Springfield, Ill., to Washington for his inauguration on March 4, 1861....

Up here we seem to be opting for a strictly do-it-yourself approach. New York supplied more men, money and material in the Civil War than did any other state, sending nearly 450,000 men into battle, of whom about 46,000 died. But the Legislature can’t even officially designate a sesquicentennial organization, lest someone try to extract a few bucks from our broke state government....

...[Y]ou’d think the states that sacrificed so much “to save the Union and to abolish human slavery in the country of the Declaration of Independence” would be just as invested in remembering the Civil War as those who had been on the other side.
Read entire article at NYT