Monthly Archives: September 2011

Federal troops originally fought only for the Union

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 … Continue reading

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Reprise: More First Rhode Island Light Artillery

When Gen. Burnside’s Ninth Corps troops marched into Knoxville in September, 1863, history has recorded that some young men of the town were so excited they rushed to join the Union army. Recruitment was more problematic out in the hills, … Continue reading

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Recruiting on Gay Street

Civil War recruiting in Knoxville in 1861 was reasonably amicable, far less acrimonious than it would become. The men in the foreground are being recruited for the Union army under the Stars-n-Stripes on Gay Street. The men in the rear … Continue reading

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Reprise: Stonewall’s Unionist Sister

One of the themes of Knoxville 1863 is the bitter division of the town and surrounding area between Unionists and Confederates. Leila Ellis, Confederate Major Clayton Ellis’s widow, is herself a Union sympathizer. Not to mention Knoxville Unionist Elisa Brownlow’s … Continue reading

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More from Lieutenant Parker

Lieutenant Ezra K. Parker of the First Rhode Island Light Artillery was in the Northwest Bastion during the Confederate attack on Fort Sanders. He wrote a memoir in 1913, in which he recollected events during the siege of Knoxville: “While … Continue reading

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The Monitor Boys

There’s a new book out about Twenty-Ninth Massachusetts Sergeant Timothy Chase’s “washtub on a skillet,” the U.S.S. Monitor. Seems the little ironclad’s crew called themselves “The Monitor Boys,” and Civil War historian John V. Quarstein has pulled together “the first … Continue reading

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Reprise: Embalming

As Sergeant Timothy Chase of the 29th Massachusetts discovers (Chapter 8: General Burnside’s Truce), embalming of the dead was a gruesome business. Yet it was essential if a soldier’s loved ones were to be able to identify a son, brother … Continue reading

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Seventeenth Mississippi reenactors

Speaking of the Seventeenth Mississippi Infantry Regiment, which, along with the Phillips Georgia Legion, led the principal attack on Fort Sanders on Nov. 29, 1863, it’s commemorated in several reenactor groups. The self-styled Rough and Readies of Company D aren’t … Continue reading

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John Calvin Fiser

Colonel Fiser led the Seventeenth Mississippi Regiment in the attack on Fort Sanders, losing an arm from a point-blank Yankee pistol shot while trying to cut down the flag pole the Seventy-Ninth New York Cameron Highlanders had erected on the … Continue reading

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Reprise: Mrs. Ellis’s copy of Lucile

I got the idea for Leila Ellis to be reading Lucile, on the night the Rebs drove in the pickets at Fort Sanders, from an old copy of the book I inherited from my Mississippi grandmother. Grandmother’s copy was published … Continue reading

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