Civil War Oddities #14

One Claude Pardigon, a Frenchman en route to join the Southern cause, challenged the skipper of a blockade-runner to a dual because he did not provide toothbrushes for passengers.

Paul A. Fusz, who enlisted as a Confederate private in 1861 at he age of fifteen, was caught with two other soldiers smuggling quinine through the Federal lines. The smugglers chewed up their papers, but their captors shot the older two. The tradition is that the pardoning of Fusz was Lincoln’s last official act.