Blog
Published: 5/5/21
Whisperwood (2020)
Whisperwood’s protagonist, Private Anderson Flowers, is based on stories passed down about author Van Temple’s great-grandfather, who shouldered a musket on behalf of the Confederacy in the 20th Mississippi. Narrated from...
Published: 4/29/21
Essential Reading on the Coming of the Civil War
Library of Congress Fort Sumter under fire, April 1861 The literature on the coming of the Civil War is more than vast—it is overwhelming. Choosing just a handful of the...
Published: 4/28/21
The Assault on Fort Blakeley (2021)
In the four years of the Civil War, Mobile, Alabama, made itself into the best defended city in the Confederacy. Its three lines of land defenses and the multitude of...
Published: 4/21/21
The Last Slave Ships (2020)
In 1808, the U.S. government made it illegal to import enslaved Africans into the United States. Twelve years later Congress went a step further, declaring participation in the Atlantic slave...
Published: 4/19/21
Kissing and Kicking Ass
Private Amos Breneman of the 203rd Pennsylvania Infantry was, by his own estimation, an ass. Addressing a male friend back in Lancaster County, he wrote in April 1865, “I am...
Published: 4/16/21
War’s Early Days
A Diary From Dixie (1906) Mary Boykin Chesnut Two days after the fall of Fort Sumter, 38-year-old South Carolinian Mary Boykin Chesnut sat down with her journal—something she’d done faithfully...
Published: 4/15/21
“The First Gun is Fired”
Library of Congress George F. Root Published three days after the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, “The First Gun is Fired: May God Protect the Right” is known...
Published: 4/14/21
What Though the Field Be Lost (2021)
Christopher Kempf has written an excellent series of poetic reflections on the crossroads of past and present at Gettysburg. How does one size up the present in terms of the...
Published: 4/9/21
Word-Clouding Lee’s and Grant’s Farewell Addresses
On the night of April 9, 1865, only hours after surrendering to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Robert E. Lee sat around a fire with a group of...
Published: 4/7/21
Incidents in the Life of Cecilia Lawton (2021)
Cecilia Lawton, the daughter of a wealthy Georgia plantation owner and enslaver, was just fourteen years old when the Civil War began, but the exigencies of war forced her to...
Published: 4/5/21
Extra Voices: Shirkers
Hard Tack and Coffee In the Voices section of the Spring 2021 issue of The Civil War Monitor we highlighted quotes by Union and Confederate soldiers about shirking. Unfortunately, we...
Published: 3/31/21
First Chaplain of the Confederacy (2020)
Darius Hubert, a French-born, Louisiana-based Catholic Jesuit, was the “first person appointed as chaplain to any Confederate military unit.” He was attached to the First Louisiana Infantry Regiment in the...
Published: 3/29/21
A Reconstruction Bookshelf
Library of Congress In this sketch by Alfred Waud, a federal official stands between armed groups of southern whites and African Americans during Reconstruction. It’s safe to say that while...
Published: 3/24/21
In the Shadow of Gold (2020)
What happened to the gold that stocked the Confederate treasury? It’s a question that has puzzled researchers, myth-chasers, and treasure hunters for decades. In his latest historical novel, Michael Kenneth...
Published: 3/22/21
The Hands-On Historian
Jimell Greene Photography Bryan Cheeseboro at Fort Stevens, where his interest in the Civil War was born. It was February 2004, and Bryan Cheeseboro was hurtling toward Olustee, Florida, in...
Published: 3/17/21
The Black Civil War Soldier (2021)
Ask any Civil War historian what they find compelling about studying America’s great national conflict and you are almost certain to receive an answer that includes the war’s visual culture....
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Published: 3/17/21
St. Patrick’s Day, 1863
On March 17, 1863, Irish Brigade commander Thomas Francis Meagher hosted elaborate festivities to mark St. Patrick’s Day. The celebration featured a number of races and prizes—and, as one Union soldier...
Published: 3/10/21
Thaddeus Stevens (2021)
Not long after the raid on Harper’s Ferry, Thaddeus Stevens lent his voice to the growing chorus of Republicans rushing to renounce John Brown. Stevens branded the radical abolitionist a...