Civil War Times

Editor’s note: The CWT team recently discovered that cwtletters@historynet.com had not been configured to send your comments to our inboxes. When that was fixed, 160 e-mails dating to 2016 poured into our computers. I apologize to everyone who wrote

In 2014, Manassas National Battlefield Park employees digging a maintenance trench discovered evidence of a burial pit. NPS experts, assisted by Douglas Owsley and Kari Bruwelheide, forensic anthropologists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Nat

THE 1ST MINNESOTA INFANTRY is most famous for its pyrrhic charge at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, when it rushed into the teeth of a much larger Confederate attack on Cemetery Ridge and suffered a staggering 82 percent casualties. But when this image o

LIKE A HARE ON AN ADRENALINE RUSH, Russ Dodge bounds from grave to grave at historic Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. The clamor of distant traffic on highways along the Schuylkill River fails to distract the south New Jersey native as he delive

TECHNOLOGICAL LIMITS prevented Civil War-era photographers from capturing subjects in motion, and sketch artists provided the most dramatic images of many memorable incidents. London-born Alfred R. Waud stood out among a talented group that included

ALLEN GUELZO, director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College (allenguelzo.com), is the author of six Civil War histories and his most recent book, Reconstruction: A Concise History, details the problems afflicting the reintegrati

John Futch was functionally illiterate, but in letters dictated to other comrades, many of whom were barely literate themselves, Futch gave subtle indications to his wife, Martha, that he was returning to North Carolina with or without a furlough. On

AS WAR CLOUDS GATHERED OVER AMERICA, Israel Washburn, Maine’s newly elected governor, downplayed the danger to the republic in his inaugural address on January 3, 1861. “We are told that the slave States, or a portion of them, will withdraw from the

The 5th Maine suffered its initial casualty at the First Battle of Bull Run when a cannonball struck Sergeant Alonzo Stinson, a baby-faced sergeant in Company H. His brother Harry, a private in the same company, remained with the dying Alonzo and was

BECAUSE OF THE TELEGRAPH, news of President Abraham Lincoln’s shooting on April 14, 1865, and death on the 15th spread quickly, and the country—both in the North and South—was in shock. The nation and government turned to Secretary of War Edwin Stant

Almost no one had ever heard of LeRoy Wiley Gresham until the Library of Congress featured his “little-known diary” in 2012. LeRoy was an invalid teenager from a wealthy slave-holding family in Macon, Ga., crippled when a chimney collapsed and crushe

WASHINGTON, D.C. BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, Washington, D.C., was vulnerable from nearly all sides. The only major fortification was Fort Washington, an early 19th-century brick and stone structure located on the Potomac River 12 miles to the south (now a

REVIEWED BY ETHAN S. RAFUSE THE CAMPAIGN THAT Union forces under the overall direction of Ulysses S. Grant conducted against Richmond and Petersburg in 1864-65 was unquestionably one of the most important of the entire Civil War. When it began, Rober