People
Published: 11/3/14
Yankee Runaways
Major Charles P. Mattocks and his two comrades, Captain Julius P. Litchfield and Lieutenant Charles O. Hunt, were on the run. The three Maine Yankees, each the member of a...
Published: 10/13/14
The Death of Roger B. Taney
Throughout the Civil War, the highest judicial officer in the United States, Roger Brooke Taney, held sympathies for the Confederacy. In June 1861—before the first major battle of the war—Taney...
Published: 9/26/14
An Interview with Graham Dozier
Our conversation with Graham Dozier, the Managing Editor of Publications at the Virginia Historical Society and recent editor of “A Gunner in Lee’s Army: The Civil War Letters of Thomas...
Published: 7/21/14
Terry’s Texas Rangers
It had been just one month since the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter in April 1861, launching the Civil War. Texas and ten other states seceded from the Union and then...
Published: 6/9/14
Hunter Davidson and the “Squib”
Hunter Davidson understood the Union Navy, having been in Federal service since 1841 as a teen-aged midshipman, a graduate of its Naval Academy and an instructor there, an officer who...
Published: 3/24/14
The Death of Jim Jackson and the Oxymoron of “Postbellum” Missouri, 1865-1866
In June 1865, Jim Jackson—one of Missouri’s more notorious Confederate guerrilla commanders—made haste for the Illinois line. The Confederate experiment to which Jackson belonged had recently ended in disaster. On...
Published: 3/17/14
Reconsidering the “Myth” of the Black Union Soldier
It’s hard to believe that 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the Hollywood movie Glory. Twenty-five years later it is also difficult to remember that for many...
Published: 2/10/14
The Civil War on the Great Lakes
When President Jefferson Davis refused to sanction a plot to take the American Civil War to the Great Lakes in the winter of 1863, Confederate Navy Lieutenant Robert D. Minor...
Published: 12/6/13
An Interview with Diane Sommerville
Our conversation with Diane Sommerville, an associate professor of history at Binghamton University and author of a recent article entitled “‘A Burden Too Heavy to Bear’: War Trauma, Suicide, and...
Published: 12/2/13
“Destructionist and Capturer”
Navy Lieutenant W.T. Glassell was furious that his faithful service was being questioned when he landed in Philadelphia in early 1862. He was coming off a long tour that had...
Published: 10/9/13
The Wound Dresser
During the Civil War, renowned poet Walt Whitman served as a nurse. His battlefield medical career began at Fredericksburg, where he tended to wounded soldiers—including his brother. Deeply moved by...
Published: 10/9/13
Civil War Amputation…In Their Own Words.
Throughout the Civil War, surgeons performed approximately 60,000 amputations—the most common battlefield operation. Such drastic measures were a consequence of the damage caused by Minié balls, which often shattered and...
Published: 7/15/13
The Pursuit
On July 7 Major General George Gordon Meade left Gettysburg and traveled to Frederick, Maryland. He found the streets crowded with people eager to get a glimpse of him. The...
Published: 7/1/13
The Battle in Public: Newspaper Reports from Gettysburg
Undoubtedly, over the next few days newspapers and blogs will provide enthralling details about the Battle of Gettysburg on the 150th anniversaries of each of its three days. In our...
Published: 6/24/13
Oh Lord, Where Art Thou? Civil War Guards, Prisoners, and Punishments
A prison register was a seemingly strange place to write the Our Father. Nonetheless, one guard from the 128th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, charged with guarding Johnson’s Island Prison, scribbled the...
Published: 6/3/13
Friends Across the Color Line
David Cornwell, formerly an infantryman in the 8th Illinois Infantry and a veteran of Shiloh, was serving with Battery D, 1st Illinois Artillery, in the summer of 1862. Stationed not...
Published: 5/27/13
Captain Kit Dalton on Guerrilla Memory, Civility, and the Rules of War
In spring 1880, more than a decade after his famous—or perhaps infamous, locale depending—“March to the Sea,” Union General William Tecumseh Sherman observed of a large gathering in Columbus, Ohio,...
Published: 5/24/13
An Interview with John Marszalek
Our conversation with Dr. John Marszalek, the Executive Director and Managing Editor of the Ulysses S. Grant Association and Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library. Dr. Marszalek is also the Giles...