Sharpshooter

Posted on March 21, 2012 by

Literary critic and writing professor David Madden’s 1996 novel Sharpshooter is the only other fiction I’m aware of about the Siege of Knoxville and, very briefly, the Battle of Fort Sanders.

It’s a good story, worth your money (as little as one penny plus shipping used at Amazon) and time (at 160 pages it’s a short read), though it’s more about the broader war and a veteran’s confused memory than the siege, more about the East Tennessee region than Knoxville or the battle.

Madden’s main character, Willis Carr, is a young, Confederate sniper (sharpshooter in the parlance of the day) who may (or may not) have been the one who potshotted Union General William P. Sanders from the tower at Bleak House. Carr just can’t remember for sure.

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At First Light

Posted on March 14, 2012 by

Historical artist Ken Smith of Pulaski, Virginia, depicts the opening artillery before the dawn attack. Print and more available here.

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Reprise: Chicken Guts

Posted on March 4, 2012 by

“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.

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General Humphreys’ honorable mention

Posted on February 23, 2012 by

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.”

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Colors of the 79th New York

Posted on February 16, 2012 by

Battle banner of the 79th New York Cameron Highlanders, principal defenders of the Northwest Bastion of Fort Sanders.

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Reprise: Federal troops originally fought only for the Union

Posted on February 9, 2012 by

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.

Posted in "Knoxville 1863", The Sesquicentennial, Twenty-Ninth Massachusetts, USS Monitor | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Embalming the dead

Posted on February 2, 2012 by

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.

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