The officer in charge of the small Union garrison inside Fort Sumter was Major Robert Anderson. Anderson, who had been stationed along with his men at Fort Moultrie, at the tip of nearby Sullivan's Island, moved his men to Fort Sumter, which sits on a small man-made island guarding the entrance to Charleston Harbor. This decision, made amid the growing crisis in Charleston following South Carolina's secession, would prove a fateful one. Newly-inaugurated President Abraham Lincoln could not abandon the fort to the Confederates, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis did not feel that he could tolerate the presence of Union troops on what he claimed was Confederate soil. Eventually, Lincoln made the decision to resupply the fort, and the Confederates began the Civil War by opening fire on the fort. Anderson, a native of slaveholding Kentucky, was promoted to brigadier general during the war, and quickly became a national hero.
Does anybody know the etymology of the phrase "sweet dreams"? I tried googling but did not find anything satisfying. Is this a relatively new phrase of the modern world or has this been in use for some time? I think it's the latter one. Answer The OED has the interjection as "a farewell to someone going to bed" from the 20th century: 1908 Sears Roebuck Catal. 198/1 Tenor Solos..Good Bye, Sweet Dreams, Good Bye. But it goes back until at least the 19th and possibly 18th centuries. John Wolcot, writing under the pseudonym of Peter Pindar, used it in his poem "Orson and Ellen; A Legendary Tale" published in 1801: Also from 1801 in The infernal Quixote (Page 287) by Charles Lucas: In the March 1776 of The Universal Magazine was published "The Serenade. A Pastoral Tale. From the German of Gesner" , where the shepherd Daphnis watches over his beloved as she sleeps and sings: The same tale appears in 1776's as Idyl XI, " Daphnis ...
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