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The Scheme to Hook Up a King With the Wasp Woman and Other Wild Plans

Khalid Elhassan August 31, 2020 34 min

Susan Cabot - Hussein of Jordan — Susan Cabot and King Hussein. Veja

12. A Civil War Teenager’s Scheme

Confederate soldiers. The Photographic History of the Civil War

During the Civil War, Reavis enlisted in the Confederate Army at age eighteen. However, he soon discovered that the tedium and travails of real soldiering were nothing like his romantic image of war. It was right around then that Reavis discovered he could make a perfect copy of his commanding officer’s signature. So he began issuing himself passes with a forged signature, to escape the drudgery of soldiery and visit his relatives.

When other soldiers noticed that Private Reavis was getting a whole lot of passes, he developed a lucrative scheme to profit from that: a sideline business of selling forged passes. When the chain of command started getting suspicious and began investigating, Reavis finagled a quick leave, ostensibly to get married. He then promptly deserted, and hightailed it out of Confederate territory. He surrendered to Union forces, and even switched sides, serving for a while in a Union Army artillery regiment.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.