It is a significant fact that the first man killed in the Revolutionary War was a colored man,—Crispus Attucks.
Nicholas Biddle was not killed, but was struck on the head with a stone dropped from a building, and fell senseless and covered with blood. His comrades, although fighting a furious mob, did not desert him, but gathered him up and put him on the cars.
Weary and wounded and bruised and battered by the mob at Baltimore, they got through alive, and were on the 18th of April quartered in the rotunda of the Capitol.
Nicholas Biddle, although sixty years old, enlisted and served throughout the war, and returned to Pottsville with those who survived the terrible struggle.
He lived till he was eighty years old; and his friends at Pottsville have erected a monument in his honor, which bears the following inscription—
“IN MEMORY OF
NICHOLAS BIDDLE.
Died 2d Aug., 1876, aged 80 years.
His was the proud distinction of shedding the First Blood in
The Late War for The Union. Being wounded while
marching through Baltimore with the First
Volunteers from Schuylkill County,
18th April, 1861.
ERECTED BY HIS FRIENDS OF POTTSVILLE.”
The very next day, April 19, the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment fought its way through the same cruel, howling mob.
RUNNING THE BLOCKADE AT VICKSBURG.
THE ship canal, and all other plans for getting below Vicksburg with enough boats to transport his troops across the Mississippi River, having failed, General Grant determined to run the blockade. Seven gunboats and three wooden steamers were put in condition to make the perilous trip.