“I’ve long considered Michael and Jeff Shaara’s Civil War trilogy to be one of the benchmarks for Civil War historical fiction. Knoxville 1863 came very close to that mark.” –Jim Chambers for Red Adept Reviews
The eBook version of Knoxville 1863—professionally edited, proofread to eliminate errors, and formatted with a linked table of contents and a map—is now available for the Kindle at Amazon for just 99 cents.
“The men call them ‘chicken guts,’” fictional Confederate Major Clayton Ellis tells his wife, Parthenia Leila Ellis, in the novel.
He was sheepishly referring to the fancy gold braid on the sleeves of his new uniform coat tailored in Nashville. The thickness of the braid distinguished the rank of the officer. Thus Clayton’s was fairly thin.
General Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, commander of the Mississippi Brigade after the death at Gettysburg of its fiery brigadier General William Barksdale, wasn’t as aggressive as his predecessor.
In fact, in the first big battle of his command, Chickamauga, Humphreys played second-fiddle to General Joseph Brevard Kershaw. Kershaw and his South Carolina brigade took far more casualties than the Mississippians whose brigade Kershaw commanded in the Georgia battle as part of a scratch-division.
So many more casualties (scores more, indicating their greater aggressiveness in the fight) that General James Longstreet, in his after-action report praise, awarded Kershaw a “distinction.” Of Humphreys, Longstreet only said that he deserved an “honorable mention.”
Battle banner of the 79th New York Cameron Highlanders, principal defenders of the Northwest Bastion of Fort Sanders.
In the novel, Sergeant Timothy Chase uses his eyewitness experience of the Monitor and Merrimack battle of 1862 as an entertaining dramatic narrative to deflect the anger some other federal troops occasionally turned on him and his comrades of the 29th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment.
They would do so, from time to time, because Massachusetts was widely known as a hotbed of abolitionism and even in late 1863, months after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves was still controversial in the North. White men there still volunteered to fight, not for black freedom, but for the preservation of the Union—one nation, indivisible.
Civil War historian Gary Gallagher’s new book The Union War helps modern readers understand this lately-discarded fact of the war’s history and how emancipation, now often said to have been paramount from the war’s beginning, was, in fact, late in capturing the dedication of the North and its white citizen-soldiers.
Which is probably part of the reason the war was followed by almost a hundred years of racial segregation—in the North as well as in the South.
The novel’s fictional Sergeant Timothy Chase of the 29th Massachusettes Infantry Regiment was detailed to see to the embalming and transportation of the regiment’s dead after the battle of Fort Sanders.
Chase’s “scientific curiosity” led him to closely inspect the embalming procedure run by a private firm at Knoxville which charged for embalming officers. The entrepreneurs usually ignored sergeants and enlisted men altogether but made an exception in the 29th’s case and embalmed them for free.
Here’s another sharp wartime photo of a similar embalming establishment where the advertising promised results “without odor or infection.” Click on the photos at the links for enlargement of the details.
Via Shorpy.
Wofford’s Brigade cooperated with the Mississippi Brigade in the attack on Fort Sanders, as it had on the second day at Gettysburg five months earlier.
But brigade commander William Tatum Wofford was absent, home in Georgia attending the unexpected funeral of a beloved daughter who had died of diphtheria.
Originally the colonel of what would become the Eighteenth Georgia Infantry Regiment, Wofford had the dubious distinction of surrendering the last unit of southern troops east of the Mississippi, on May 12, 1865, in Resaca, Georgia.
Newly revised statistical measure of the Civil War has the numbers of male deaths and consequent widows and orphans much higher than previously believed.
“Even as Civil War history has gone through several cycles of revision, one thing has remained fixed: the number of dead. Since about 1900, historians and the general public have assumed that 618,222 men died on both sides. That number is probably a significant undercount, however. New estimates, based on Census data, indicate that the death toll was approximately 750,000, and may have been as high as 850,000.”
Adjusted for today’s population that would be about seven and a half million.
Go here for the whole story. And more here on YouTube.
In Houston, in 1867, Confederate veterans famously organized a home for 250 orphans of deceased Confederate soldiers.
