The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman in permanent additions to the English lexicon; within the text of "Tristram Shandy" Sterne describes the novel as "Shandean," coining a term which still carries the meaning that Sterne originally attached to it when he wrote, "I write a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good humoured "Shandean" book..." Strongly influenced by Cervantes' "Don Quixote", Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" also gave rise to the term "cervantic," (which Sterne at the time spelled "cervantick"). In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery, Ignatius Sancho wrote to Laurence Sterne encouraging the writer to use his pen to lobby for the abolition
USS Tristram Shandy (1864) of the devastated fallen Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Two days later, the ship moored at Baltimore, Maryland, where the admiral was greeted with the sad news that the President had been assassinated the previous night in Washington. On 26 April, the ship returned to Hampton Roads to continue her duties as a dispatch vessel, operating off the Virginia Capes, concurrently serving as a lookout and keeping watch for the Confederate ram , believed to be still at sea and unaware that hostilities had ceased. "Tristram Shandy" then conveyed Confederate prisoners of war to Fort Pulaski, Georgia, in late May