Chancellorsville’s Forgotten Front at Civil War Monitor

Civil War Monitor is featuring today an excerpt from Chancellorsville’s Forgotten Front: The Battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church by ECW’s Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White:

It’s easy to miss what remains of the Salem Church battlefield, and if not for the stone statues that stand sentinel next to the roadway, you might not know there’s a battlefield there at all. Without them, it’s easy to mistake Old Salem Church itself as nothing more than a quaint brick structure next to a graveyard on a postage stamp of green, hemmed in by parking lots, strips malls, and mutli-lane state roads packed with cars.

The statues, erected by veterans of the 15th and 23rd New Jersey Infantry, are pretty much the only reminders of the martial history of the ground. Even the ground itself is gone—graded flat and hauled away in dumptrucks in an effort to level the area for development.

But here, the Army of the Potomac’s last best hope of the Chancellorsville campaign ran into ruin.

Read on at Civil War Monitor.