Showing results for "Chancellorsville"
“I Heard the Bells On Christmas Day…”—Repost
The following is a post that originally ran on December 13, 2011: The Christmas carol “I Heard the Bells On Christmas Day” was originally a poem. Written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, it was arranged and set to music by John Calkin, who took it upon himself to edit out two stanzas which refer directly to […]
Read more...The Secret Life of Walter Taylor
Guest post by William Floyd, Jr. On May 2, 1861, Walter Herron Taylor received a telegram from Virginia Governor John Letcher (1860-1864), instructing him to report for military service in Richmond. Upon arriving in Richmond, he was assigned to headquarters of the Army of Virginia, of which Robert E. Lee was in command. At the […]
Read more...Lookout Mountain
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Lookout Mountain—”The Battle Above the Clouds,” as it later became known because the morning fog and the smoke of battle that hung cloud-like midway up the mountain while the mountaintop loomed above. “The battle of Lookout Mountain is one of the romances of the war,” Union […]
Read more...From the Stone Wall to a Shad Bake
This is another post in the series “Tales From the Tombstone.” George Edward Pickett was ecstatic on the morning of July 3, 1863. His division, which had missed the fighting at Chancellorsville in May and had been way in the rear during the first two days at Gettysburg, was about to lead the decisive charge on […]
Read more...Stones in the Road: “The Situation Was Not Promising”
Part four in a series. Early on the morning of September 22, 1863 Phil Sheridan’s division limped into Chattanooga. Their defeat only two days before along the banks of Chickamauga Creek was wearing heavy on the men as they took their assigned places in the city’s entrenchments. Sheridan remembered “The enemy, having now somewhat recovered […]
Read more...Cut Them Some Slack: It’s not the rangers’ fault they have to turn visitors away
The Friday afternoon drizzle that started midway through Pennsylvania turned to a steady rainfall by the time I hit Maryland. Across the Mason-Dixon line and across the Potomac, the rain continued to fall. Autumn should have been in full blaze around me, but the rain dampened the colors the same way it dampened my spirits. […]
Read more...“The” Turning Point of the War: The Wilderness, not Gettysburg
I was working at the Wilderness today, and I couldn’t think of a better place to be sitting in the wake of the Gettysburg sesquicentennial. Why? Well, while throngs of people stare at the bronze tablet by the copse of trees along Gettysburg’s Cemetery Ridge, I’m hanging out on the battlefield where the war’s most […]
Read more...A Surfeit of Heroes: Custer At Gettysburg, July 3, 1863 / Part 2
The term invincible is often found in accounts of Gettysburg. Lee referred to the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia as invincible, and so they seemed after Chancellorsville. On May 15, when called to Richmond by Confederate President Jefferson Davis for a strategy meeting with the Cabinet, Lee presented his plan to deal the […]
Read more...The Year of Grant
In my last post on ECW, I noted some generals who rose to prominence and took senior roles in 1863. At the top of the list was Major General Ulysses S. Grant, which may have seemed a surprising choice. Yet upon further examination, the year 1863 emerges as the most important in Grant’s military career. […]
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