If I may be allowed just a moment of blowing my own horn…..

Tom Ryan of Bethany Beach, Delaware, the president of the Central Delaware Civil War Roundtable,, and an expert on intelligence gathering operations during the Civil War, and who regularly reviews new Civil War books, has published a review of my history of Rush’s Lancers in yesterday’s edition of …

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I wanted to offer a ringing endorsement of one of Chris Wehner’s projects. Chris runs a web site called Soldier Studies. Here’s the mission statement:

This site is dedicated to the preservation of American Civil War information, particularly the correspondence and diary entries of soldiers who served in the field and elsewhere. We hope that by providing a comprehensive and searchable archive of this information a more complete picture of one of the bloodiest chapters in American history can be better understood by researchers, historians, and students alike. Unlike other Civil War databases, this one will remain free and open to the public.

In the course of searching for primary source material for our study of the retreat from …

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My father had his stroke eight weeks ago yesterday. As I’ve said here before, when it first happened, he was almost 90% paralyzed on the right side of his body, his speech was a mess, he had a large cut in the vision in his right eye, and I fully expected that, at age 86, he would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and that he would have to spend the rest of his days in a nursing home. I had fully prepared myself for that probability, and was trying to find ways to make things easier for my mother. At his age, I never figured he would have sufficient recuperative power to (a) bounce back …

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Sorry for being quiet the past few days. I’ve been slowly but surely plugging away at getting the retreat from Gettysburg manuscript finished. I’ve made some excellent progress, but I’ve still got a way to go. I’ve still got a bunch of new sources to plug in. This evening, I’ve been incorporating material from one of my very favorite sources, The National Tribune, a veterans’ newspaper that was the forebear of Stars and Stripes. I still have a number of those articles to go, as well as the material from a number of books. If all goes well, I should finish some time this week.

In 1998, Gregory Acken published the letters of Capt. Francis Donaldson of the …

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I am just back from a trip to Gettysburg. I went there to meet J. D. and our other co-author for the retreat project, Mike Nugent. We were there to shoot photos for the two driving tours and to check all of the GPS coordinates and see if there was any additional material to add to the driving tours. It was a whirlwind trip.

I left on Thursday afternoon and got there about 9:00. We met at the Reliance Mine Saloon, had a couple of cold ones, and called it a night, as it was going to be an early morning. I stayed at my friend Stan O’Donnell’s weekend mansion, which is located adjacent to East Cavalry Field. Stan and …

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Yesterday, Susan and I traveled up to Lake Erie. There’s a place called Lakeside, which is near the Marblehead lighthouse. It’s near the …

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It’s been a long time since my last good rant. However, after scooping something close to ten pounds of dog poop in the back yard, I’ve got a good one coming.

The Battle of Monocacy, fought July 9, 1864, has long fascinated me. I first visited the battlefield in April 1992, not long after the National Park Service acquired the land. At that time, other than the monuments that were placed on the battlefield by the veterans, there was no interpretation whatsoever, and no visitor’s center. We were left to try to figure it out on our own. It was very difficult to do, and knowing almost nothing about the battle, I failed pretty miserably. All I could do …

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The other day, I posted about how the New York draft riots drew thousands of troops away from the Army of the Potomac, thereby depleting the strength of the army. Over the course of a few weeks, the Fifth Corps division of U. S. Army Regulars, an entire brigade of Vermonters, and nine other regiments were sent to New York to keep the peace. The Vermonters and the Regulars were some of the best and most battle-tried troops in the army, and they would be difficult to replace.

The army of the Potomac suffered about 25% casualties during the battle of Gettysburg, or about 23,000 men killed, wounded, and captured. There were another 1,000 or so casualties in the fighting …

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I had one of those Eureka moments that occasionally hit me this evening. As I may have mentioned previously, we decided to add a brief epilogue to the retreat book that covers the period between Lee’s crossing of the Potomac (July 13-14) and the return of the armies to the banks of the Rappahannock River at the end of July. I wrote about four pages on this time frame. It has very little in the way of detail, but it fills the gap in the story and brings the story of the Gettysburg Campaign full circle.

While writing this piece, I remembered that, among the many hurdles that George Gordon Meade had to face during the retreat from Gettysburg, he …

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Don Caughey did an interesting post on his blog about his favorite Gettysburg cavalry regimental monuments. His favorite seems to be that of the 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry. I can’t help but wonder whether he missed my favorite.

A Tipton photo of the monument to the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry appears with this post, courtesy of the Virtual Gettysburg web site. The monument features 6 full-scale, exact replicas of the lances carried by the men of the regiment for the first year and a half of the Civil War. The monument itself is made of granite, and has six sides, representing the numeric designation of the regiment. It also features the regiment’s logo, and is quite simple but elegant.

It also has …

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