Showing results for "franklin"
Middle Child and Second Fiddle: The Sad Fate of Second Manassas
Try as I might, I can’t persuade my daughter to explore anything to do with Second Manassas. It’s July 29, 2000. Steph is six but already the veteran of several battlefielding campaigns, and she’s particularly a fan of First Manassas because that’s where her hero, Stonewall Jackson, got his nickname. She’s been eagerly urging us […]
Read more...The Fourth of July and the Death of Independence
Just before the Fourth of July last year, I happened to work at the Jackson Shrine. Here’s a piece I wrote in response to that experience, originally published last year at another blog I write for, Scholars & Rogues. The clock on the fireplace mantel along the far wall still ticks away the seconds. On […]
Read more...Reynolds Reconsidered
Was John Fulton Reynolds a great corps commander? Was Reynolds even a great general? And why do Civil War buffs have such a high regard for an officer who did so little in the Civil War compared to the likes of Stonewall Jackson, George Meade, Robert E. Lee, or Ulysses S. Grant? While these questions […]
Read more...Jackson’s Mountain Top Rendezvous
May 8, 2012 marks the 150th anniversary of Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s first victory in the Shenandoah Campaign of 1862. Some historians credit this victory, at the Battle of McDowell, as the first battle in that infamous campaign—others credit his only defeat at 1st Kernstown-I’ll let you be the judge. Following the action […]
Read more...The Civil War’s Forgotten Vice-President
At night, the Kenduskaeg Stream runs through downtown Bangor like an eel in the dark, barely visible at the bottom of the concrete canal that channels it to the Penobscot River. Where the dark night ends and the surface of the water begins isn’t always easy to tell except when an errant ripple glistens in […]
Read more...And Your Age Is?
Today we welcome guest author Jim Sundman. When future New Jersey governor Franklin Murphy walked into a recruiting office for the 13th New Jersey Volunteers in Newark on July 19, 1862, he told the enlistment officer he was eighteen, the legal age in which to join the Union Army without permission. Murphy, who was well-educated […]
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