CVBT History Wire – “A Man Could Have Got Almost Anything He Wanted”: Soldier Pickups on Central Virginia Battlefields, Part 1
CVBT History Wire – “A Man Could Have Got Almost Anything He Wanted”: Soldier Pickups on Central Virginia Battlefields, Part 1
The May 2024 “CVBT History Wire” examines a number of accounts where Federal and Confederate soldiers acquired things from the area battlefields to meet their needs and make life in camp and in the ranks a little more bearable.
This is an interesting topic. The “acquisitions” could also be unusual. One is the account by then-Maj. R. Snowden Andrews, who in 1863 authored the Confederate version pf the Federal drill manual Instruction for Field Artillery (Barry, Hunt, and French). Andrews told of walking the battlefield of Beaver Dam Creek/Mechanicsville the day after the June 1862 battle and to his delight coming across an abandoned copy of Patten’s Artillery Drill (a simplified adaptation of the official drill).
It is fascinating sometimes what Civil War soldiers picked up. Of course, those that mention things are all that we have to go on. One wonders just how much got acquired from battlefields that never made it into the sources we use to examine these types of topics.