TOCWOC - A Civil War Blog

For the past two years I’ve been more interested in the historiography of the Civil War than the actual events itself. The historiography through memory writing school is relatively new to the Civil War history scene, led by historians like David Blight, but it’s making steady progress. While most works (including this site) [...]

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Being a history major and frequenting various history related websites, one cannot help but be inundated by narrative based pop histories, usually to my disdain. In fact, this book, controversial in the blogosphere if not on Amazon, only arrived at my house because I proved too lazy to preempt the Book Club from sending [...]

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At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, formal hostilities during the Great War came to an end with the German signing of an armistice. Though the United States had not participated in the war to the same extent as European nations, Armistice Day immediately became a day [...]

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In addition to Rafuse’s book about McClellan, this book ended up in my house more by chance than out of interest. In all honesty, I’m more interested in discussion of how Lincoln’s death affected Reconstruction policies, but this is not on the agenda.
What Kauffman did accomplish was a strong offering of pop history with [...]

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After staring each other down on the 18th, with both catching a much needed breather, Lee finally withdrew his army from Sharpsburg and was able to cross the Potomac during September 19-20. Though McClellan did try to strike at Lee, most notably at Shepherdstown, Lee’s rear guard was formidable enough that officers throughout the [...]

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Although McClellan had largely stayed out of the political fray through 1862, Rafuse argued that McClellan’s most ardent supporters could not deny that McClellan actively worked to delay reinforcing Pope during the Second Manassas campaign once the Army of the Potomac was evacuated from the Peninsula.
McClellan ultimately got what he wanted out of Pope’s misfortune. [...]

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Part 2 of my review of Rafuse’s McClellan bio left off with the Army of the Potomac landing at Fort Monroe to begin the Peninsula Campaign.
McClellan had already faced a number of issues in planning the campaign even before reaching the jumpoff point. The first option for the landing spot (Urbana) had [...]

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In Part 1 of my review of Ethan Rafuse’s recent McClellan bio, we left off after Chapter 4. With the nation teetering on the brink of war, McClellan supported Stephen Douglas’s successful Senate reelection campaign against Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln went on to win the presidency in 1860 due to the split of the [...]

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This past week my father had the incredible fortune of getting to attend a business meeting in Gettysburg, becoming my second non Civil War obsessed relative to wind up there by chance in as many months, while I freeze in Milwaukee. And yet I still had to talk him into going on a [...]

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To complete my undergraduate history degree last Spring, I was required to write a thesis driven paper at least 20 standard pages long. After getting some guidance from my supervising professors, I wrote a paper twice that size on the historiography and public perception of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Conversely, I am not sure a paper [...]

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