The High Tide of the Confederacy: Chancellorsville

While popular history tells us that Gettysburg marked the turning point of the American Civil War—“The High Tide of the Confederacy”—most people don’t realize that story evolved as a shrewd marketing ploy to promote the town of Gettysburg as a tourist destination. Located near many of the major population centers of the eastern U.S. (Washington, Baltimore, […]

Read more...

Shaping Chancellorsville: CVC

part six in a series In 1957, the FSNMP master plan called for the addition of a visitor center at Chancellorsville to replace the contact station built by the CCC.[1] Original plans called for placing the building on the south side of modern Route 3, but the state highway department began discussing the possibility of widening […]

Read more...

Shaping Chancellorsville: The first reenactment and ‘The Last Meeting’

part five in a series In 1933, administration of the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park was turned over to the National Park Service, and shortly thereafter, the NPS invited the Civilian Conservation Corps to come in to the park to do restoration and preservation work. Among their projects at Chancellorsville, they installed a visitor […]

Read more...

Shaping Chancellorsville: Establishing the park

part four in a series After the Chancellorsville Battlefield Association fizzled, a second effort to establish a battlefield park got underway in the area in 1898, sparked first by the Fredericksburg City Council, joined later by the Virginia state legislature. Their promotional literature cited Fredericksburg as “the gateway of the Confederacy” and that “through its […]

Read more...

Shaping Chancellorsville: Pre-park preservation efforts

part three in a series While the Jackson Monument represents the first effort to set aside property at Chancellorsville, efforts were soon underway to preserve far more of the battlefield. By 1891, a group of northern and southern veterans formed the Chancellorsville Battlefield Association (CBA) “to acquire and hold for posterity the most important points […]

Read more...

Essex County’s Native Sons

Approximately 45 miles southeast of Fredericksburg, Virginia, sits the town of Tappahannock. The name originates from the Algonquian word lappihane (or, it has also been noted, toppehannock). When translated, it means roughly “Town on the rise and fall of water.” The town is better known today for the singer Chris Brown who mentioned it in one of his songs. […]

Read more...

Shaping Chancellorsville: The first memory memorialized on the field

part two in a series The first effort to mark out events on the Chancellorsville Battlefield came as early at 1883, although some accounts suggest it happened as early as 1876. Former members of Stonewall Jackson’s staff placed a large quartz boulder along the Orange Plank Road to mark the area where Jackson had been […]

Read more...

Shaping Chancellorsville: How memories of the battle shaped the battlefield

part one in a series It has become the stuff of legends: Astride his horse, Traveller, Robert. E. Lee rides into the Chancellorsville clearing, the mansion in flames behind him, his men gathered ‘round with hats off, cheering wildly. It’s late morning, May 3, 1863, and the Army of Northern Virginia has overcome odds of […]

Read more...

Eastern Theater versus Western Theater: Where the Civil War Was Won and Lost: The Conclusion to a Series

The conclusion of a series. This series was put together from one of my extended graduate school research papers. The sources used were the current research between 2007-2008, obviously the historiography of the Civil War expands on a monthly basis, thus some of the “current research” in the paper is no longer exactly current. ********* […]

Read more...