Many people who visit Fredericksburg have the impression that Ambrose Burnside was an idiot and not fit to command the Army of the Potomac. While the Battle of Fredericksburg was indeed a hard loss for the Union, the fact is that Burnside was given command for some reason. That reason lies mainly in his operations in North Carolina.
Read MoreYesterday marked the 150th anniversary of the surrender of Confederate General Joseph Johnston to Union General William Sherman. While history focuses on Lee’s surrender at Appomattox as the end of the Civil War, Johnston’s surrender at Bennett Place was significantly larger and demonstrates the lack of a definitive end to the war.
Read MoreIn December 1862, the city of Fredericksburg found itself in the crossfire of the armies of Lee and Burnside. For several months that summer, residents were forced to deal with the indignities and inconveniences of living in an occupied city. Now the Union army was back once more and this time General Robert E. Lee and his army were in place to contest their presence. With armies on either side of it, Fredericksburg braced itself for the storm.
Read MoreOn April 18, 1862 it was the Union army that came into Fredericksburg. That Good Friday morning the Confederates left town, burning the bridges over the Rappahannock River, making way for the Federals to arrive that afternoon. Mayor Montgomery Slaughter and a delegation from the town surrendered Fredericksburg on April 19 under the agreement that local citizens and private property would not be harmed. Union soldiers under General Irvin McDowell built bridges, crossed on May 2, and settled on the outskirts of town for a four month stay.
Read MoreStephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage borders between classic literature and Civil War battle narrative. In his unique style, he writes stories of battle without specifying names. In The Red Badge of Courage most characters are not distinguished by name, nor does Crane specify what part of the battlefield, what troops, or what actions he is writing about. He purposely avoids using real characters and creates a fictional regiment (the 304th New York Infantry) in order to focus the audience’s attention on the experience of the protagonist, Private Henry Fleming, and his comrades as they face their first battle. The purpose of the books was to engage readers in the chaos, emotion, and uncertainty of battle and the experiences of a common soldier within the maelstrom.
Read MoreApril 14, 1865 dawned as a good day in Washington, D.C., not merely because of the religious importance of Good Friday to the city’s Christians, but more due to the events of the past eleven days. In just over a week and a half the Civil War began to rush towards a momentous finish. On April 3, Richmond, the Confederate capital, fell to the Army of the Potomac. Less than a week later, roughly seventy-five miles to the west and south, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, retiring the Confederacy’s most formidable fighting force. Despite this bevy of success, the war was not yet over. Joseph E. Johnston continued to elude Union forces in North Carolina, Jefferson Davis and most of the Confederate government remained at large, and scattered pockets of resisted still stood across many rural reaches of the South. Yet, for many in Washington, including Abraham Lincoln, the final act of the conflict was near at hand. As Richard Carwardine noted in his biography of Abraham Lincoln, these were “twilight days between war and peace.” Indeed, by the end of Good Friday, a day which began so promising in the nation’s capital, that twilight would seem all the more deeper.
Read MoreNow that the 150th anniversary of Appomattox has passed, the Civil War sesquicentennial is over, right? Not quite.
Most Americans consider Appomattox the end of the war; that was certainly what I was taught in school when I was younger. However, Robert E. Lee’s surrender is only the beginning of the end. When Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox he surrendered only the men under his command, not the entire military force of the Confederate States of America.
Read MoreCasualties of the Battle of Appomattox Court House are buried in a small Confederate cemetery just outside the town.
Read MoreMuch has been made of the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865. Historians note that myth surrounds those final bedraggled days of the Army of Northern Virginia, the magnanimity with which Union soldiers welcomed their fellow Americans back into a nation at peace, and the causes won and lost in the subsequent years. Though it took months for the rest of the remaining Confederate forces to surrender their arms, no moment stands more clearly in historical memory as marking the end of the United States’ most costly war than the meeting in which Robert E. Lee surrendered his forces to Ulysses Grant. While myth may obscure some of the more concrete realities of that day – what was with Wilmer McClean anyway? – the peace wrought by those two great generals was nothing short of remarkable both for what it ended and what it began.
Read MoreThe Battle of Sailor’s Creek, many will argue, was a final death knell for Lee’s army. In the day’s engagements Lee lost about a quarter to one-third of his army (depending on which casualty report you look at), 8,800 men out of the roughly 30,000 effectives he had that morning. Of these casualties, around 7,700 were captured or surrendered—one of the largest surrenders without terms during the war. Among this number was almost the entire corps of Richard Ewell—3,400 of his 3,600 men were among the dead and captured. Ewell himself was taken prisoner, along with seven other Confederate generals: Joseph B. Kershaw, Montgomery Corse, Eppa Hunton, Dudley M. DuBose, James P. Smith, Seth Barton, and Robert E. Lee’s son, George Washington Custis Lee. Anderson’s corps lost around 2,600 out of 6,300 and Gordon’s casualties numbered at 2,000.
Read MoreThe Union army broke the Confederate lines at Petersburg early on April 2 after the engagement at Five Forks the previous day. Lee knew the position was lost, and the army’s only hope was to move west to find reinforcements and supplies. With the Confederate army moving west, Richmond was now exposed to the Union army. That night the Confederate government and the troops left in the city evacuated in haste, taking the last open rail line to Danville, VA, which would be the last seat of the Confederate government. Throughout the night into April 3, retreating Confederates set fire to portions of the Confederate capital, hoping to destroy supplies before the Union soldiers could reach them.
Read MoreIn the waning days of March 1865, as the armies in both blue and gray languished in the muddy trenches of Petersburg, Ulysses S. Grant still searched for a final, climatic battle. However, since 1861 the Civil War had transformed into a type of warfare very different than lines of soldiers advancing across open, rolling fields. As both armies settled into miles of intricately built trenches and stalemate ensued, that Clausewitzian final battle of apocalyptic proportions seemed increasingly unlikely. The end of the war would come, but in ways not even the premier military leaders of the time expected.
As winter turned to spring in 1865, Robert E. Lee’s confederate Army of Northern Virginia was suffering from a chronic lack of supplies, rising casualty figures, and heavy desertion. However, the Virginian had created an extremely strong line of defenses around Petersburg that the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut that was the Army of the Potomac had been unable to breach. Grant knew that if a weakness on this line could be found and exploited properly, it could not only mean the fall of Petersburg and subsequently Richmond, but eventually the surrender of Lee’s Army and the end of the war.
This opportunity came on Petersburg’s Western Front 150 years ago, on April 1, 1865, at a place where five roads converged. It became not only a battle of strategic importance, but also a captivating study in leadership and reputation. The Battle of Five Forks was brief, but its significance unquestionable.
Read MoreOn January 31, 1865, the United States Congress narrowly passed an amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery; that this was accomplished thanks to the American Civil War is undeniable. That destroying slavery became a primary goal of the Civil War, however, was not initially expected. Many northerners were extremely reluctant to abolish the institution. Only through the actions of enslaved men and women, a small group of abolitionists, and the interaction of U.S. soldiers with the brutal institution was the North compelled to focus on slavery. Which begs the question: Could slavery have been abolished without the Civil War?
Read MoreFor soldiers, leaving home and entering a world far different from civilian life, change would come rapidly and without mercy. Soldiers went through a psychological evolution from civilian to volunteer to soldier as they coped with the challenges of war, each step changing them more and taking them further from their civilian lives. This process included suppressing pre-war identities and creating new ones, identities based on professionalism and a certain amount of callousness in order to survive the war.
Read MoreThe 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox is less than a month away.
If you have spent any time around a battlefield or related Civil War historic sites, you have probably heard people musing about what these commemorative landscapes will look like after the sesquicentennial closes. In short, many (most) people presume: they won’t look like much. Even die-hard Civil War buffs are predicting a sharp decline in visitation, interest, and enthusiasm once Appomattox passes.
I find that deeply troubling.
Read MoreOn the evening of July 3, 1861, a dozen Union soldiers (self -described “disciples of Faust”) broke into the offices of the of the Virginia Republican—a decidedly secessionist organ—and appropriated the newspaper’s office for their own use. The next morning—on the Fourth of July—the first issues of the American Union hit the streets of Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia). The newspaper—composed and printed entirely by Union soldiers—enjoyed a brief existence in Martinsburg, lasting only as long as the Union troops occupied the town. Despite its brief existence, however, the paper sheds light onto the patriotism and zeal of Union soldiers during the war's opening months.
Read MoreRecently a friend provided me with an article from February 23, by Gordon Wood in The Weekly Standard. Throughout that piece, “History in Context: The American Vision of Bernard Bailyn,” Wood praised his mentor for seeing the large themes and movements in American history without being waylaid by minutia, while simultaneously criticizing the current state of the history profession. It seems that Bailyn’s Peopling of British North America series, originated in 1986 has received a fair amount of criticism because it relegates the experiences of Native and African Americans to the sidelines. Criticism that Wood asserts is unjustified, but is also telling on the state of the historical profession. Namely that “[i]t’s as if academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should become simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.” Wood goes on to argue that the academic focus on “inequality and white privilege in America society” via the proliferating studies of race and gender history has distracted the historical community. As a result, many readers lack the ability to gain from historians the full narrative of American history. Wood believes that the attention to African-American slaves, women, and Native Americans has fragmented the study of history in such a way that the attention to contemporary moral standards has anachronistically distorted the study of the past, taking it out of context.
Read MoreDred and Harriet Scott hold hands in front of the St. Louis courthouse where they first sued for their freedom, and look forever through the famous St. Louis Arch. While the arch specifically relates to the Louis and Clark expedition and westward expansion, it also represents for many the American Dream...
Read MoreOn March 9, 1862, the famous duel between the ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (better known as the Merrimack) occurred at Hampton Roads. Both ships signaled the dawn of a new age in Naval tactics and architecture; however, the Virginia makes more of an impact on the navies of the world and is made more remarkable in the fact that she was built by a confederation with so few resources and had such a short career. The Virginia only lived for nine weeks between the time she was floated and her destruction; she spent only twelve days out of dry dock during those nine weeks, and was in battle for a total of about twelve hours. In that short time span and with the resources pulled together by a fledgling Confederate government, the CSS Virginia ushered in the next era of naval technology.
Read MoreIn March 1857, the Supreme Court delivered a ruling that sent shock waves through the north. In the Court opinion delivered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, slaves were not considered citizens of the United States and could not sue in Federal Court, but more importantly Congress did not have the authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. For free labor/free soil advocates in the north, this was a major step backwards in the efforts to contain the spread of slavery.
Everything centered on one man, a slave named Dred Scott.
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