Doing Time in Dauphin County, 1842-1901

They locked up Elias Nation on April 18, 1842, giving him official first place in Dauphin County’s new prison. (For the record, Jacob Stripe was registered nearly two weeks earlier, for assault and battery, but he was out before the prison’s grand opening.) Nation was twenty­-nine years old and looked “yellow,” wrote Keeper Wil­liam Watson; he underlined that fact in his...
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The Grand Review Revisited

To celebrate its victory in the American Civil War, the federal government hosted a Grand Review of Union veterans in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, May 23, 1865. Although the war preserved the Union and ended slavery, the parade was organized exclusively for white soldiers, and veterans of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) were not invited to participate. Refusing to be ignored, former...
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