The Front Line

A different look at the words Abraham Lincoln used in his iconic Gettysburg Address.

A look at William T. Sherman's Special Field Orders 120, which set the tone for the March to the Sea ...

A look at Cincinnati, Ulysses S. Grant's favorite war horse

A look at Traveller, Robert E. Lee's famed war horse

Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, Mary Livermore, a 40-year-old native of Boston, volunteered to work for the United States Sanitary Commission in hopes of being of assistance to the Union war effort. She soon became an agent at the organization's Chicago branch (where she would eventually be promoted to co-director), in which capacity she organized a variety of aid socities and...

A look at the legacy of Union general George H. Thomas, the "Rock of Chickamauga"

In the Fall 2019 issue of The Civil War Monitor we highlighted quotes by and about nurse Clara Barton, known as the "Angel of the Battlefield." Unfortunately, we didn't have room to include all that we found. Below are those that didn't make the cut.

On August 14, 1861, the sense of anger and disgruntlement that had been building among the men of the largely Scottish-American 79th New York Infantry "Highlanders" boiled over. The rank and file of the regiment, which had suffered one of the highest number of casualties among Union units engaged in the recent Battle of Bull Run (including the death of their colonel, James Cameron, brother to the...

Anyone who has spent considerable time in research libraries or logging onto digital archives knows what it feels like to come to the end of an evidentiary road. A promising file of letters reveals huge gaps in the writers’ correspondence. A tantalizing detail in a census record leads nowhere. A diary entry ends with a page torn out. Historians must make what they can of such incomplete evidence...

In July 1861, only months after the outbreak of the Civil War, Belle Boyd—the 17-year-old daughter of a prosperous family in Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia)—experienced a traumatic event that helped spur her to become a spy for the Confederacy. Boyd told the story of the incident—excerpted below—in her 1865 autobiography, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, a book considered by...