Suspended animation in fiction which is indistinguishable from death. In American fiction, the first story to deal with suspended animation is the tale of Rip Van Winkle, a short story by American author Washington Irving published in 1819 as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. In the story, a British subject in the American colonies wanders into the Catskill Mountains in the years before the American Revolutionary War, and finds a group of fairies, whose moonshine he drinks. He then falls asleep for 20 years, and returns to his village in what is now the United States, finding his home town
Peter G. Van Winkle as a Unionist to the U.S. Senate, where he served from August 4, 1863, to March 3, 1869. While in the Senate, Van Winkle was chairman of the Committee on Pensions (Fortieth Congress). During President Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial, Van Winkle broke party ranks, along with nine other Republican senators and voted for acquittal. These 10 Republican senators were disturbed by how the proceedings had been manipulated in order to give a one-sided presentation of the evidence. Senators James Nixon, James Rood Doolittle, William Pitt Fessenden, Joseph S. Fowler, James W. Grimes, John B. Henderson, Lyman Trumbull, Peter G. Van