Beautiful Harper’s Ferry, sitting at he confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers at the bottom of the steep trio of Loudon, Bolivar and Maryland Heights, once had one of only two federal arsenals in the United States, which is why John Brown decided to begin his slave uprising there. Less than two years later, …
APPALACHIAN SUMMER: HARPER’S FERRY, WVA, AUGUST 4th Read More »
Given the size of the armies engaged, the Battle of Perryville, fought on October 8, 1862, was one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Generally thought of as a confederate tactical victory but a Federal strategic victory–what that means is that after a ferocious, day-long the rebels forced the Yanks to withdraw from …
hanks to the folks at Jackson-McNally Bookstore in Soho for hosting a panel discussion by three of us who have been contributors to The New York Times‘ Disunion series, and to the new compilation of pieces from the series published by Black Dog & Levanthal. Clay Risen of the Times, Ted Widmer of Brown University, …
The first engagement in which William Cushing distinguished himself was at the battle of Crumpler’s Bluff, which was in Franklin, Virginia. Federal officers designed a combined army-navy operation against elements of Longstreet’s army camped near Franklin on the Blackwater River in October 1862. While Navy gunboats under the command of Charles Flusser made their difficult …
William Cushing‘s last engagement was at Fort Fisher, in January 1865. Located on a piece of land separating the Atlantic and the Cape Fear River in southern North Carolina, the fort protected shipping bringing goods across the Atlantic and up the river to Wilmington, which, in 1865, was the confederacy’s last open port. The fort, …
At Plymouth, I reached the site of William Cushing‘s great triumph, the place where he sank the CSS Albemarle with a manual torpedo, a perfectly ridiculous offensive weapon. At a lovely little museum devoted to the event and to the Albemarle‘s earlier triumphs and to otherCivil War events in Plymouth, I met some wonderful people, …
The Maritime Museum at Newport News is just splendid. The museum has a lot of terrific artifacts, including the pricelss eafle figurehead from the USS Lancaster, and a whole exhibit on Nelson and his battles at Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar. The highlight is the the terrific exhibit on the Monitor and the Virginia, including …
Spent the day at the Naval Academy, viewing the library’s special collection of material relating to the Civil War hero William B. Cushing. I visited Cushing’s grave, above, and the Academy museum at Preble Hall. Highlights included the original `Don’t Give Up the Ship’ flag flown by Oliver Hazard Perry aboard the USS Niagara in …
(This first appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 7th.) When I last took weekend blog duty here, I coincidentally had an article in The New York Times in which I noted that the US Army had ten bases named after Confederate generals, and argued that we should rename them as soon as possible. My point, in …
Tony Horwitz has written an excellent article in The Atlantic called “150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War.” Horwitz, author of the very pereptive A Confederate in the Attic, makes the point that point that most Americans have a thin but generally positive view of the war, a post-WW II, post-civil rights era assessment that …