TOCWOC - A Civil War Blog

If you’re new To TOCWOC, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!As a followup to my previous post about a present-day marksman in Afghanistan, I am posting (with his kind permission) Gary Yee’s article about a lone marksman at the Battle of New Orleans and the effect he had. Gary, [...]

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David H. Jones new novel Two Brothers: One North,One South tells the true story of the Prentiss brothers William and Clifton whose familial love will be strained by the Civil War. The book opens in May 1865 with mortally injured William Prentiss admittance to the Armory Square Hospital. Despite being a Rebel the poet and [...]

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There’s a lot of ongoing controversy about the effect of the rifle in battle, but there’s no question that in certain times and places an individual rifleman can have a powerful effect. One such example comes to us from Afghanistan:
During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun ambush [...]

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This week marks the anniversary of the ill-fated Confederate assault on Fort Sanders, on what was then the outskirts of Knoxville, TN.
This year’s anniversary of the Knoxville campaign comes as students of the Civil War in East Tennessee and around the country begin organizing a campaign of their own to commemorate the war’s upcoming 150th [...]

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More and more archives are being digitized and made available on the web. The latest is The Archives of Michigan digital collection. Lots of good stuff here, including muster rolls, casualty lists and a very good selection of period photos. I haven’t had a chance to look through it but it looks promising for Michigan [...]

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While looking through Francis A. Walker’s Second Army Corps in the Army of the Potomac I came across this passage, which describes the fighting between Heth’s division and Hancock’s Second Corps at the Battle of Boydton Plank Road:
It may be interesting to pass to the Confederate side and see how the operations of the 27th [...]

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Lincoln and His Admirals by Craig L. Symonds
Product Details

Hardcover: 448 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 17, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195310225
ISBN-13: 978-0195310221

If this book is not a finalist for a major award in Lincoln and Civil War history, we will have a gross injustice. This intelligent, [...]

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A Lincoln letter, or at least an official copy, has surfaced at the Dallas Historical Society. It’s the famous “Bixby letter” in which the president attempts to console a mother for the loss of her five sons. There are problems, as the article points out—Lydia Bixby was no fan of Lincoln’s; all of her sons [...]

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Longtime TOCWOC reader Mark Kucinic recently contacted us with the following interesting observation:
I just finished reading a biography of Winfield Scott and ran across a piece of info I have never noted before. I went back through my somewhat extensive library and have taken part in a number of discussions about the origins [...]

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One of the most common features of the Civil War battlefield was the rifle pit, especially in the last two years of the war. Yet this feature was unknown in Napoleon’s time. As the name suggests, the rifle pit’s introduction coincided with the widespread use of the rifle, and can be dated to the Siege [...]

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