George Gordon Meade (1815-1872)

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

Founded in 1862 amid the Civil War, the Union League of Philadelphia began as a patriotic society rallying support behind President Lincoln and the cause of preserving the Union. Its members recruited and financed regiments for the war effort, including some of the first Black troops raised in the North. In the decades after the war its prominent membership turned to political reform and a wide range of civic and philanthropic work.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2012

For three weeks in June 1864, Logan Square filled with exhibits, goods, and crowds as the U.S. Sanitary Commission's Great Central Fair raised more than a million dollars for Union soldiers and their families. The Commission had grown out of the vast, largely female volunteer effort to feed, nurse, and comfort the men at the front. On June 16, President Abraham Lincoln—making his only official public appearance in Philadelphia—stepped before the crowd to praise the work being done there.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1998

John Page Nicholson fought in the Civil War and then devoted his life to remembering it. A meticulous scholar, he edited the two-volume Pennsylvania at Gettysburg and worked to preserve the battlefields at Gettysburg and Valley Forge. In 1888 he helped found a library and museum dedicated to the war he had lived through.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

The house at 912 Walnut Street sheltered two remarkable George McClellans. The father, a physician, founded Jefferson Medical College and lived here until his death in 1847. The son, raised here as a boy, grew up to command the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War's early years and to run for president against Abraham Lincoln in 1864.