I saw a Holiday note this morning that showed a prominent politician eating an ice-cream cone. The caption- it was from one of the parties, of course- wished me a “Happy Memorial Day.” I have done the same thing- said the same words, though I don’t eat as much ice cream as I used to. I […]

(General Henry Wager Halleck, Union Commander in the West, 1862). It is only about 24 miles from Pittsburg Landing to Corinth, MS, but it can seem a lot further. Maybe it is the state line. Maybe it is the guy in charge. The front end of the War in the West features General Ulysses Grant […]

It is all about choice, you know? General Lew Wallace had a choice about the road he took to get to the Pittsburg Landing battle at Shiloh. I showed you a picture of the bend in the Shunpike- the spur to the left would have taken Lew Wallace’s Division to the River Road, and thence […]

Major General Lew Wallace, his division, and my Great-great Grandfather stopped at Crump’s Landing to destroy the tracks of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. It was one of the things armies did in those days, and I am interested to discover that my ancestors specialized (in appropriate context) the mass destruction of railroad rolling stock […]

(Union troops at ease, reading letters and smoking in the field. Image USG). James Foley was as excitable an Irishman as you can imagine- which is to say, he was a sort of passive-aggressive approach to events that were far larger than any individual, and a determined insistence on doing things his way. He had […]

Hah! You thought we were done with this? No way. Great-Great Uncle Patrick had the gift of gab, and that is why he is the certerpiece of so many family stories about the sprawling history of the Civil War. is stories about his role as a teenager and young man in the War Between the […]

(Mr. Claude Minnich, almost former owner of Clark’s Hardware on historic East Davis Street in downtown Culpeper. Photo courtesy Vincent Vala, Star-Exponent Staff Photographer). OK- this is going to be a little disjointed, so forewarned is forearmed, you know? The trip to New Orleans and Raymond, Mississippi put 2,335.6 miles on the odometer of the […]

(Those who died during the Battle of Raymond were buried on a hillside in the Raymond Cemetery. The hillside later became the Raymond Confederate Cemetery. Randal McGavock was buried here the day after the battle of Raymond, but later removed. The plot is mowed neatly and well maintained. Photo Socotra). I felt triumphant that our […]

(Colonel Randall McGavock, 10th Tennessee Irish Regiment, CSA) We walked back up the asphalt path that surrounds the core area of the battlefield at Raymond slowly. Both of us are having some mobility problems these days- I beat my knees into submission and the arthritis is painful, amplified by that damned ruptured quadriceps a couple […]

We were walking the paved loop around the core battlefield at Raymond. It was a sunny Mississippi afternoon, the air languid and soft against our skin. There was another walker on foot, maybe a quarter mile ahead, and a jogger over by the abandoned concrete road and bridge across Fourteen Mile Creek. “The Raymond battlefield […]