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River of Death–The Chickamauga Campaign: Volume 1: The Fall of Chattanooga by William Glenn Robertson. California: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. ISBN-10: 146964312X; ISBN-13: 978-1469643120. Photographs. Maps. Appendix. Pp. xvi, 680. $45.00. This highly detailed narrative of Union General William Rosecrans’ 1863 campaign against the key transportation center of Chattanooga, Tennessee, starts on July 4th of that year, just as his Tullahoma campaign—“a resounding success”—was prematurely stopped by the […]

Response to Dr. Williamson Murray’s essay, “The American Left Needs a History Lesson” https://www.newsweek.com/american-left-needs-history-lesson-opinion-1518488 When some of the participants in protest marches commit indiscriminate vandalism and engage in looting, there is little to defend it. That is insufficient reason to disparage the whole movement with accusations of historical ignorance. Dr. Williamson Murray’s essay, incidentally, has a few problems of its own. The 54th Massachusetts Regiment was not “the first Black […]

There is no doubt that Ron Chernow tells a beautiful story in his recent biography of Ulysses S. Grant. He is especially compelling in discussing the fight for Black civil rights during Reconstruction. But throughout, the author takes his subject’s side in controversy after controversy, even when the evidence doesn’t support it. And Chernow has a seriously deficient understanding of Grant, of the Civil War, and of military matters, in […]

I located Sgt. William H. Busbey’s post-war article about his being near Grant’s Savannah headquarters and on Tigress during the trip to Pittsburg Landing on April 6th in the Chicago Inter-Ocean. Some obvious errors make it not completely reliable, and it may be completely unreliable, but it does make for interesting reading: “I was at Savannah in April, 1862, associated with the work of the Adams Express company . Myself […]

William T. Sherman, speaking at an annual meeting of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee, concluded that the war’s penalties should be shared by both North and South, because of their mutual involvement in the institution of slavery. “And I, born of Connecticut parents, bearing in affectionate remembrance the virtues of my honored ancestors, and yielding to no man in admiration of the intelligence, refinement, industry, and thrift […]