July 06, 2015

The Creation of Gettysburg National Cemetery

July 06, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

On July 4th, 1863 Meade’s Union army rejoiced as the sights and sounds of a Confederate army in retreat ensured them of their victory. For the North, Independence Day 1863 was a day of rejoicing and confirmation with victory at both Gettysburg and Vicksburg. But in the midst of victory, July 4th was also sobering for the men who fought around that Pennsylvania town for it was the first chance they had to inspect the battlefield and attend to the dead...The Union soldiers and Gettysburg civilians that looked over the battlefield on July 4th saw a level of death and destruction that was overwhelming and seemingly impossible to take care of.

July 02, 2015

Memories of Hazel Grove: The III Corps at Gettysburg

July 02, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

Daniel Sickles was an infamous figure even before the war began. Sickles is notorious for his role in the Battle of Gettysburg, a role that was debated between generals and officers after the war, a debate that continues today. The III Corps under Sickles arrived at the battlefield over a period of time from the evening of July 1 after the fighting had calmed for the day into the morning of July 2. Meade intended the corps to extend his line along Cemetery Ridge, attaching themselves to the end of the II Corps line and ending at the base of Little Round Top. Whether Sickles misunderstood his orders or willfully disobeyed them, the III Corps ended up in another position entirely.

June 29, 2015

"I Give Him To Your Charge": Young Soldiers in the Civil War, Part II

June 29, 2015/ Civil Discourse

"By this time," Charles Bardeen wrote in his memoirs, entitled A Little Fifer's War Diary, "my readers are wondering how my family allowed me to enter the army at so early an age, while I would still go off alone and cry if anybody spoke harshly to me..." My readers are probably wondering the same thing. Modern parents cannot imagine allowing their 13 or 14-year-olds to go to war and yet, as we saw in my first post, many boys fought in both the Union and Confederate armies. Where, we might reasonably wonder, were their parents? What would compel mothers and fathers to allow boys far below the legal enlistment age of 18 to enter the army and put their lives on the line?

June 20, 2015

A Different Side of Stuart

June 20, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

Despite JEB Stuart's mixed reputation, he has a prominent monument on Monument Avenue...

June 11, 2015

"Consent in Case of Minor": Young Soldiers in the Civil War, Part I

June 11, 2015/ Civil Discourse

Edwin Jemison has a famous face. If you've taken a history class in the United States, you've almost certainly seen him in your textbook; if not there, then in a photo montage in any documentary. There's something about the look in his eyes that seems to have captivated historians, textbook authors, and the general public.

We see his fictional counterparts portrayed in the media, as well, for that same emotional effect. In Cold Mountain, for example, the first character we follow across the screen is a young, beardless, enthusiastic Confederate soldier, of whom Jude Law's character observes, "He can't be old enough to fight, can he?" Predictably, the young soldier is wounded and dies within the first fifteen minutes of the film.

June 04, 2015

The Unfortunate Case of David O. Dodd: "Arkansas' Boy Martyr" or Fool?

June 04, 2015/ Zac Cowsert

Young David O. Dodd hung on the end of a rope in the yards of his alma mater, St. Johns’ College. His death was not a merciful one, as the rope stretched and nearly five minutes passed before Dodd finally passed away. Convicted of spying on occupation forces in Little Rock, Arkansas, David had been sentenced to death by Union forces. The date was January 8, 1864, and David Dodd was only seventeen years old.

June 01, 2015

Mental Stress in the Union Army

June 01, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

The conditions and new experiences of the war were unsettling to the volunteer soldier, and they had to deal with them mentally as well as physically. Some men adapted to the war better than others, but all were affected by what they saw, did, and felt. As Argentinean writer José Narosky said, “In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.” Becoming callous to the death and destruction of battle did not mean that soldiers were impervious to its effects. Men had to overcome and reverse their cultural understandings of killing other men to be effective soldiers; for many men it was easier to die than to kill.

May 28, 2015

The Mayhem & Mystery of May 3: Joseph Hooker and the Battle of Chancellorsville

May 28, 2015/ Zac Cowsert

Complacency endangers history. The first plausible answer is not always the correct or solitary one, yet all too often we content ourselves with simplistic solutions to murky questions. Civil War historians have grappled with the Battle of Chancellorsville for nearly 150 years, and we (surprisingly) we still have very simple rejoinders for why Joseph Hooker and the Army of the Potomac lost a struggle which they entered into with every advantage. Joe Hooker lost the Battle of Chancellorsville because of his own arrogance and errors. Joe Hooker lost Chancellorsville because he was no match for the Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Fighting Joe Hooker lost Chancellorsville simply because Fighting Joe Hooker lost confidence in himself.

In all likelihood, there are grains of truth to all these theories. Yet one should be careful of placing too much emphasis on anyone of them singularly. Instead, I wish to focus on a forgotten answer to the age old question of what went wrong for the Union army and Joe Hooker in May of 1863. On the morning of May 3rd, General Hooker was wounded, probably suffering a severe concussion received from Confederate artillery fire. This event, minimized and overlooked in many accounts of the battle, perhaps played a far greater role at Chancellorsville than history has given credit for.

May 25, 2015

The “Murder” at Shy Mansion: Embalming in the Civil War

May 25, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

In 1977, during the restoration of the Shy Mansion in Franklin, TN workers noticed a disturbance in the estate’s family cemetery. A grave had been opened, a hole cut in the cast iron case, and a body lay half out of the grave. When they called the authorities in, the sheriff determined it to be a recent homicide where the culprit had attempted to hide the body in the older grave. He sent the body to Nashville for examination by Dr. William Bass. Bass noticed that the clothing on the deceased was not made of any synthetic fibers and the coat was in an older style. When testing the tissues, he found that he was examining a body that had been embalmed with arsenic. The man who lay on the table before him was Colonel William Shy in a perfect state of preservation 113 years after his death at the Battle of Nashville.

May 21, 2015

Scapegoat or Scandal? J.E.B. Stuart and the Battle of Gettysburg

May 21, 2015/ Zac Cowsert

The June 12th, 1863 edition of the Richmond Examiner seethed. Just days before, Confederate cavalry had been caught completely by surprise in a daring strike by their Union counterparts at Brandy Station Virginia, and only after a hard fight with the help of Southern infantry was the enemy repulsed. “But this puffed up cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia,” the Examiner crowed, “has been twice, if not three times, surprised since the battles of December, and such repeated accidents can be regarded as nothing but the necessary consequences of negligence and bad management.” Such humiliations were unacceptable, and the Examiner concluded by charging that better organization, more discipline, and greater earnestness among “vain and weak-headed officers” was needed. Other Southern papers offered more of the same. The Richmond Sentinel called for greater “vigilance…from the Major General down to the picket.” The Charleston Mercury thought the affair an “ugly surprise,” while the Savannah Republican thought it all “very discreditable to somebody.” The commander of Confederate cavalry, James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart, had to be wondering if the Brandy Station fight wasn’t “discreditable” to him...

May 18, 2015

A Story of Heroism….And Coffee

May 18, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

Perhaps the most prominent of the monuments around Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam is not to a regiment who fought there, or indeed any fighting at all. It is a monument to coffee. Well, that and future president William McKinley.

May 14, 2015

Turning the “Gate of Hell” into the “Gate of Heaven”: The Secret Andersonville Death Roll of Dorence Atwater

May 14, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

In late June, Clara received a note from one Dorence Atwater who requested a meeting with her concerning information he had about approximately 13,000 of the missing men she was looking for. Intrigued, Clara visited Atwater at his Washington hotel. Atwater had enlisted at the beginning of the war, even though he was only 16. Captured after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, he was first imprisoned at Belle Isle and then transferred to Andersonville when it opened in February 1864. Impressed by Atwater’s superior penmanship, the commander of Andersonville, General John H. Winder, assigned him to the surgeon’s office with orders to keep an official record of all union prisoners who died and were buried there. The Confederates promised they would turn the roll over to the Union government after the war, but Atwater suspected their sincerity as he experienced the cruelty of the prison and recorded over 100 deaths per day.

May 11, 2015

History on the Honeymoon: Chincoteague in the Civil War

May 11, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

The cemetery was almost unnoticeable from the road. Because it is on a dune very close to the water separating the island from Chincoteague, the water and shifting sand had obliterated all essence of an established cemetery. Most of the grave markings were gone, replaced by official looking plaques marking the location of graves. It certainly did not look like a Civil War cemetery. But there was one Civil War-style headstone marked by an American Flag with the words “Thos. Watson, Co. A, Loyal Eastern VA. Vol.”

April 30, 2015

Burnside's Success: The Battle of New Bern

April 30, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

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.

April 27, 2015

In the Shadow of Appomattox: The Significance of Bennett Place

April 27, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

Yesterday 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.

April 23, 2015

Caught in the Crossfire: Civilians at Fredericksburg

April 23, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

In 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.

April 20, 2015

"Yankee Candy Would Choke Me": Fredericksburg Occupied!!

April 20, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

On 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.

April 16, 2015

The Red Badge of Courage and the 124th NY

April 16, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

Stephen 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.

April 13, 2015

Sesquicentennial Spotlight: After Appomattox

April 13, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

Now 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.

April 09, 2015

“To See What Freedom Meant:” April 9, 1865 (Sesquicentennial Spotlight)

April 09, 2015/ Becca Capobianco

Much 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.

Blog Posts

Civil Discourse