Category Archives: “Knoxville 1863”

Fort Sanders to be spared removal

The monument destructors, beginning with the destroying of a Rebel rifleman’s statue in Durham, North Carolina, are hard at work in Knoxville, splashing (appropriately) blue paint on one Confederate monument. Which they have petitioned the city to remove. Fortunately Fort … Continue reading

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Christmas wishes from Old Cahawba

The novel’s Union-sympathizing Parthenia Leila Ellis hailed from Alabama where her family’s plantation, The Cedars, was near the former-state capital of Cahawba. In 1864, Cahawba still had a Female Academy for the young daughters of plantation owners in the vicinity, … Continue reading

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Signal flags at Knoxville

Gen. Edward Porter Alexander was a colonel at Knoxville, in charge of Longstreet’s artillery, where he put to good use the signal flags he’d learned to use as a U.S. Army officer under Albert J. Myer, an army surgeon, before … Continue reading

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Nashville’s Confederate Cleansing

In the novel, Knoxville’s Union-sympathizing Confederate widow Parthenia Leila Ellis’s slain husband Clayton bought his fancy Confederate uniform—with the gold braid “chicken guts” of a major on its coat sleeves—from a tailor in Nasvhville. In the latest attempt to appease … Continue reading

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Colonel Solon Z. Ruff

SOLON Z. RUFF, colonel of the 18th Georgia which followed the Phillips Georgia Legion in the attack on Fort Sanders, was a graduate of the Georgia Military Institute and a professor there until the war began, according to the web … Continue reading

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Reprise:Susan Brownlow

Parson William Gannaway Brownlow was as popular in the North as he was despised in the South. So when the Confederates finally kicked him out of Knoxville, he and his wife Elisa and their daughter, Susan, enjoyed great acclaim in … Continue reading

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Grave of Fort Sanders’ commander

First Lieutentant Samuel Nicoll Benjamin, who commanded Fort Sanders while the political general who was its nominal commander spent his time drinking, is buried at Saint Phillips Church Cemetery in Garrison, New York. The cemetery is across the Hudson River … Continue reading

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Phillips Legion at Knoxville

The Phillips Georgia Legion (or Phillips Legion of Georgia or simply Phillips Legion) rates its own chapter in the novel, for its co-starring part in the attack on Fort Sanders. Although this stirring little animation of its battle flag does … Continue reading

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