Category: Generals
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The Ewell Contribution
A few days ago I wrote about the ‘Ewell Option ‘ — a plan for General Richard Ewell to strike at US forces in northern Virginia in April or May 1862 — and how instead Ewell decided to stick with Stonewall Jackson and support his efforts in the Shenandoah Valley. The resulting campaign became famous and […]
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The Great Escape: Taylor at Irish Bend
April 1863 did not go well for Confederate General Richard Taylor. At the beginning of the month he had hoped to take the initiative against US forces in lower Louisiana; but by end of the month he was struggling to hold together his broken army after having lost the initiative, lost half his fleet, and […]
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Lincoln’s Search for Generals
I follow discussions at other blogs and on online civil war forums and again and again I have seen debate about the choices Lincoln made in picking generals. I believe that the usual view of why some so-called ‘political’ generals were chosen is incomplete or misguided. While there was a political element to all the […]
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“You have let me sleep in peace for the first time.”
Recently the NY Times had a blog post by Richard Slotkin titled Washington in Disarray the focus of which was on the crisis in Washington at the beginning of September 1862 and President Lincoln’s decision to keep Gen. George McClellan in charge of the army. There is an element to the story that I feel […]