Recruited from New Orleans’ teeming waterfront by soldier of fortune Roberdeau Wheat, the 1st Louisiana Special Battalion more than lived up to its pugnacious nickname—Wheat’s Tigers—at the First Battle of Manassas.
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Civil War Bushwhackers and Jayhawkers
For half a decade before the Civil War, residents of the neighboring states of Missouri and Kansas waged their own civil war. It was a conflict whose scars were a long time in healing.
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Target: Railroad Town Corinth
The strategic railroad town of Corinth was a key target for Confederate armies hoping to march north in support of General Braxton Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky.
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The North’s Unsung Sisters of Mercy
A cadre of dedicated Northern women from all walks of life traveled to the charnel houses of the Civil War to care for the sick and wounded.
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Literal Hill of Death
With Ulysses S. Grant’s army steadily menacing Vicksburg, Confederate General John Pemberton left the town’s comforting defenses to seek out the enemy army. Too late, he found it, at Champion’s Hill.
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Desperate Stand at Chickamauga
Brigadier General John King’s disciplined brigade of Union Regulars found itself tested as never […]
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Smith-Taylor Disagreement
The Trans-Mississippi West was hardly a picture of soldierly bliss and harmony, either. There […]
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Camp William Penn’s Black Soldiers In Blue
Under the stern but sympathetic gaze of Lt. Col. Louis Wagner, some 11,000 African-American […]
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Frederick Stowe in the shadow of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
The fame of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe followed her son throughout the Civil War.
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Stonewall’s Only Defeat
A furious Stonewall Jackson watched impotently as his proud Confederates stumbled down the hillside at Kernstown, Va. “Give them the bayonet,” Jackson implored–but no one obeyed.