Published: 11/10/11Happy Birthday Marines!By: Laura June DavisCategory: The Front Line To celebrate the 236th Birthday of the United States Marine Corps, we found this image of Civil War marines. The caption reads, “The United States Marines and Marine Barracks at...
Published: 11/9/11Going Back the Way They Came (2011) & I Will Give Them One More Shot (2011)By: James I. Robertson Jr.Category: Book Reviews It was in the 1950s when historian Bruce Catton first called attention to the value of Civil War regimental studies. These personal collections of experiences and quotations by the men...
Published: 11/8/11A Regiment of InventorsBy: Civil War MonitorCategory: The Front Line “In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence,...
Published: 11/7/11Voices from the Past: “A Slow Affair”By: Laura June DavisCategory: The Front Line William Thompson Lusk (May 23, 1838 – June 12, 1897) was an American obstetrician, who left medical school to join the Union Army. Lusk participated in the Battle of Port...
Published: 11/7/11Voices from the Past: “The Glorious News from Port Royal”By: Laura June DavisCategory: The Front Line After the Union victory at Port Royal, Major General George Brinton McClellan wrote the following letter to his wife, Mary Ellen Marcy McClellan. “Nov. 1861. — You will have heard...
Published: 11/7/11The Confederate Perspective: “Port Royal…has been taken by the enemy’s fleet”By: Laura June DavisCategory: The Front Line “Port Royal, on the coast of South Carolina, has been taken by the enemy’s fleet. We had no casemated batteries. Here the Yankees will intrench themselves, and cannot be dislodged....
Published: 11/7/11Voices from the Past: “Sagacious Military Conjecture”By: Laura June DavisCategory: The Front Line Wilder Dwight was a Lieutenant Colonel inthe 2nd Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Prior to dying September 19, 1862 from wounds at the Battle of Antietam, Dwight wrote some conjectures about...
Published: 11/7/11Voices from the Past: “The Gratifying Duty”By: Laura June DavisCategory: The Front Line Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Port Royal—one of the earliest amphibious operations of the American Civil War. The United States Navy fleet and the United States...
Published: 11/4/11Image of the Day: The Dogs of WarBy: Terry JohnstonCategory: The Front Line From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, “An Incident of Battle — A Faithful Dog Watching the Dead Body of His Master”: Credit: Frank Leslie’s The Soldier in Our Civil War.
Published: 11/3/11Sarah Morgan’s Arrival in Yankee-Occupied New OrleansBy: Terry JohnstonCategory: The Front Line In April 1863, 21-year-old Sarah Morgan, along with her mother and sisters, found herself on a ship headed for the city of her birth, New Orleans. The Morgan family had...
Published: 11/2/11General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A. (2011)By: Jeffry D WertCategory: Book Reviews A consensus among many Civil War historians is that the Confederacy lost the conflict in the West, the vast region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. Union armies...
Published: 10/31/11Mrs. (“Beast”) Butler’s Scary DreamBy: Terry JohnstonCategory: The Front Line Happy Halloween! To celebrate, we found a spooktacular letter from the archives… On April 4, 1862, Sarah Hildreth Butler, wife of Union general Benjamin F. (“Beast”) Butler, wrote a friend...
Published: 10/31/11“They See a Ghost or Something.”By: Terry JohnstonCategory: The Front Line On May 25, 1863, Union soldier David L. Day, of the 25th Massachusetts Volunteers, recorded a strange incident that occurred while his regiment was on a recent nighttime march: Sometime...
Published: 10/31/11Voices From the Past: “I am truly thankful for the institution of ghosts…”By: Civil War MonitorCategory: The Front Line “You perceive that my idea of ghosts is not limited to graveyards and tombs, or the tenants thereof; indeed, so far from it, the most troublesome I have ever known...
Published: 10/31/11Voices from the Past – Out of That Silence Rose New Sounds More Appalling StillBy: Laura June DavisCategory: The Front Line The Battle of Fredericksburg (December 11-15, 1862) was a decisive loss for the Union army, crippling northern morale. The chilling quote below derives from Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s description...
Published: 10/28/11Are You Ready for Some (Civil War) Football?By: Terry JohnstonCategory: The Front Line Winslow Homer’s depiction of Union soldiers playing “Foot-Ball” in camp. Looks harmless enough… Image credit: Library of Congress.
Published: 10/27/11Teaching Slavery as the Cause of the Civil WarBy: Andrew L. SlapCategory: The Front Line “What caused the Civil War?” Historians have killed forests trying to answer this deceptively simple question. In a recent essay in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Frank Towers...
Published: 10/26/11Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia (2011)By: Brian Craig MillerCategory: Book Reviews As Joseph Glatthaar argues in his new study, “scholarship that focuses on soldiers is stuck” (xiii). Over the last few years, historians have engaged in a roaring debate about the...
Published: 10/26/11The Iron Way (2011)By: Elizabeth VaronCategory: Book Reviews William G. Thomas’s The Iron Way is a tour-de-force, and offers a series of bracing insights about the origins, shape and outcome of the Civil War. Thomas argues that the railroads...
Published: 10/25/11Respect My Heritage; You Can Stick YoursBy: Andy HallCategory: The Front Line Several news stories appeared in the media recently updating recent developments in a neighborhood dispute in South Carolina that’s been brewing for about year now. The brief recap is that...