Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, the wry commercial artist who gave the world dogs playing poker, was born in upstate New York in 1844 to abolitionist Quaker farmers, who named him after one of the most eloquent anti-slavery politicians of the antebellum South, Kentucky Sen. Cassius Marcellus Clay. Ninety-eight years later, another great son of the Bluegrass State - the greatest of all time, it's been said of the three-time heavyweight champion whose great-great-grandparents may have been owned by Sen. Clay's slave-holding brother, Henry - would be named for him, too, for a spell.

The Minnesota Territory became the 38th state on May 11, 1858, just in time to help elect Lincoln and provide him with 22,000 troops for the initial Union war effort. Meanwhile, thousands of Swedes and Norwegians kept arriving to farm the vast wheat fields and work in the forests and sawmills up north. With St. Paul and Minneapolis growing astride the headwaters of the Mississippi, and Duluth at the westernmost point of the waterway connecting Lake Superior to the Atlantic, Minnesota was emerging as a great North American crossroads.

When the war ended in 1865, the industrialized North was flourishing, while gray-coats trudged home to a shattered economy. Food was so scarce that northerners had to organize charity drives to keep some of their defeated countrymen from starving. Two-thirds of the value of Confederate assets had been destroyed, including most of the railroads and factories. The slave-labor force had been emancipated, and much of the white population was angry and demoralized. In Alabama, the Montgomery Advertiser noted that a "spirit of lawlessness seems to pervade the town. Men seem the prey of reckless despair, and, forgetting the laws of God and man, to give way to the phrensy of wild beasts."