Category Archives: The Northwest Bastion

Firing the 1861 Springfield

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Dick Stanley

This Hungarian fellow who styles himself capandball on the Internet has a really thick accent but if you listen closely you can get the gist of his description of the 1861 Springfield percussion rifle-musket he’s firing here. Most Confederates, if … Continue reading →

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“Our own good Colonel Cameron”

Posted on March 16, 2015 by Dick Stanley

Long before they defended Fort Sanders’s Northwest Bastion, the Seventy-Ninth New York Cameron Highlanders was decimated on the slope of Henry Hill at First Manassas, where their first regimental colonel, James Cameron, was killed by a bullet in his chest. Cameron’s … Continue reading →

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The very ancient design of Fort Sanders

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Dick Stanley

Fort Sanders was the combined work of (first) Confederate engineer  Danville Leadbetter and (second) Union engineer Orlando Poe, with impromptu assistance from Union artilleryman Samuel Nicoll Benjamin. But the overall design, from the fort’s earthen ramparts to the dry ditch surrounding … Continue reading →

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Reprise: Monitors repulsed

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Dick Stanley

The novel’s Sergeant Timothy Chase of the Twenty-Ninth Massachusetts made much among his fellow Union soldiers of his unique view of the Monitor and Merrimac (CSA Virgina) battle in Hampton Roads back in 1862. Chase thought he’d seen the future … Continue reading →

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One man used an axe

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Dick Stanley

This Harper’s Weekly lithograph is the only picture I know of that shows a Union defender wielding an axe in defense of the Northwest Bastion of Fort Sanders. “One man used an axe,” U.S. Army Lieutenant Samuel Nicoll Benjamin wrote … Continue reading →

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More from Lieutenant Parker

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Dick Stanley

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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John Calvin Fiser

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Dick Stanley

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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Gen. Joseph Wheeler

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Dick Stanley

Confederate cavalry attacking the city was Parthenia Leila Ellis’s first thought when the sounds of battle awakened her the night the Rebels drove in the pickets at Fort Sanders. The cavalry was commanded by Gen. Joseph Wheeler of Georgia who … Continue reading →

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