Trivial Trivia - taking trivia to new levels

[L Verge]

I just ran across two trivial pieces pertaining to the Civil War era that I thought I would pass along:

Someone reminded me that some things never change. Over the past five years or so, there has been much ado about the U.S. "water boarding" some of our captured enemies. This is not a new technique.

According to Mark E. Neely, Jr. in Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp.110-112, "'Handcuffs and hanging by the wrists were rare, but in the summer of 1863, the army had developed a water torture that came to be used routinely.' The bureaucracy of the Lincoln administration reacted in predictably bureaucratic fashion... No one exploded in indignation and horror. No one issued a special order demanding that such practices cease. No one requested an investigation or study...No one expressed any personal outrage...there was no impulse to correct the abuse; indeed no one saw it as abuse."

The other little "oddity" does not have a citation, but supposedly "Four years after the conclusion of the war, Sgt. Gilbert H. Bates of Wisconsin marched through the defeated South carrying a United States flag. Bates, a Union veteran, made a bet with a friend that he could walk penniless from Vicksburg to Washington carrying the American flag and subsist entirely on Southern hospitality. His goal was 'to disprove the belief, held widely in the North, that disloyalty to the Union was still rampant below the Potomac and that a man could not take the Stars and Stripes onto Southern soil without being murdered.' He pulled it off successfully through a long, 1,400-mile march without one major incident along the way."