Some of you know that I have been involved with the Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation for a number of years. I sit on the TSBF’s advisory board, and was the author of the text that appears on the Virginia Civil War Trails markers that grace the battlefield. It’s been a pleasure to be involved with what began as a successful grass roots movement by some dedicated local citizens who have done brilliant work with the assistance of the CWPT.

Unfortunately, these groups tend to be plagued by political problems and political issues. One of the founding members of the organization, who had been a board member, has had a major falling-out with the organization and is now a major …

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One aspect of battlefield preservation that was not addressed yesterday is the issue of picking and choosing.

Some preservationists draw a line in the sand each and every time that someone even remotely threatens something that they consider to be important. Their posture is much like that of the NRA–never, ever give an inch because it will lead to giving yards. The problems with that approach are numerous:

1. It causes people to look at preservationists as unreasonable and irrational.
2. It means that relationships with developers and zoning authorities are contentious instead of cooperative.
3. It means that everything is costly and emotional when it need not be so.
4. It means that, at times, the baby ends up …

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Those who know me know how important the cause of battlefield preservation is to me. Perhaps that’s part of the legacy that I inherited from Brian Pohanka and my friend Bud Hall, who were two of the three founders of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites (“APCWS”). The APCWS was, of course, merged with a rival group, the Civil War Trust, forming the current organization, which is called the Civil War Preservation Trust (“CWPT”).

The folks at the CWPT are dedicated professionals who are determined to do the right thing and the best that they can do to preserve battlefield land. Of that, I have no doubt. I’ve worked with them on several occasions, and they …

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Copyediting is an integral part of the publishing process.

Let’s get this way out of the way first. EVERYONE needs the services of a good editor. I don’t care who you are, or how good a writer you may think you are….you’re not as good as you think you are. That includes me too, by the way. I am painfully aware of my own shortcomings as a writer. I have always had a tendency to overuse the passive voice, and it’s a constant, and never-ending battle for me to keep that particular problem under control. I also am occasionally prone to using unduly long and unnecessarily complex sentence structures when there are times that simpler is clearly better.

Let’s also …

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I’ve already unleashed a fair number of rants about publishers on this blog. It turns out that I’m not finished.

I have some strong ideas about what I do and do not like about books. Here are a few general rules:

1. More pictures/illustrations are preferable to less.
2. There can NEVER be too many maps.
3. Footnotes are preferable to end notes.
4. If end notes are the only option, then do not use one for an entire paragraph and lump a bunch of different sources together.
5. Any book without a bibliography is not a book that I will buy.
6. The same holds true for an index.

Those are my general rules for what I look for …

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For a number of years, I have been fascinated by Ulric Dahlgren. He’s a young man who definitely had “the right stuff,” to borrow a line from Tom Wolfe. He had all of the tools to become a truly great cavalryman. A colonel at 21, he was dead at 22, having been completely disavowed by the Army.

In May 1863, just after the Battle of Chancellorsville, then-Capt. Dahlgren accompanied Joseph Hooker to Washington when Hooker went to consult with Secretary of War Stanton and President Lincoln. At that time, Dahlgren was serving on Hooker’s staff. Because his father, Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, was a close friend of the President, the young captain had unprecedented access to the White House …

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I grew up in Berks County, Pennsylvania. The county seat of Berks County is the City of Reading. When Bvt. Maj. Gen. David McMurtrie Gregg resigned his commission in February 1865, he settled in his wife’s home town of Reading. Her family, the Heister family, was one of the leading families of Berks County, and they were wealthy, prominent citizens. Thus, it made sense that Gregg, who grew up in Huntington, Pennsylvania, would settle in Reading.

Berks County, in turn, readily and enthusiastically embraced David Gregg, treating him as a favorite son. The old soldier became a regular on the rubber chicken circuit, and he wrote extensively about his service in the United States Army. He became a leading leading …

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Last spring, I attended a special event on Ohio’s only Civil War battlefield, the Battle of Buffington Island, in Meigs County, on the Ohio River. Buffington Island was fought on July 19, 1863, between Morgan’s Raiders and a large force of Union cavalry. The battlefield is in imminent danger of being destroyed by being dug up for a sand and gravel pit. I had been there once before, and wanted to see it again while it was still pristine.

The visit got me thinking about John Hunt Morgan. If ever there was a Confederate cavalry officer who was grossly overrated, it was John Hunt Morgan. Morgan had no talent for scouting, screening, or reconnaissance whatsoever, and was largely useless in …

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In the course of researching the Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry (also known as Rush’s Lancers), I found the story of Theodore J. Wint. This man fascinates me, and it’s really a shame that his story has been forgotten by history. I intend to rectify this.

Wint, who was born near Scranton, Pennsylvania on March 8, 1845, enlisted as a private in the Lancers at age sixteen in 1861. By June 1864, he wore a sergeant’s chevrons, and he was then commissioned first lieutenant on July 1, 1864. He served honorably until the expiration of his term of service on September 30, 1864, when he mustered out of the volunteer service as a nineteen-year-old lieutenant. On February 20, 1865, he enlisted as …

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Just to show that I’m an equal opportunity basher, I have plenty of gripes about some of the commercial presses operating out there.

There are some commercial houses out there that really have very little in the way of quality control. White Mane, as an example, is not much more than a vanity press. They have extremely indifferent editing, not much in the way of proofreading, they use really poor quality materials to manufacture their books, and they don’t seem to care about actually publishing books. What I mean when I say that is that my friend Ben F. Fordney, who has spent most of his retirement studying George Stoneman, has written a very good bio of Stoneman, the first …

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